


Prettier When You're Broken

by Asreoniplier (AsreonInfusion)



Category: Video Blogging RPF, markiplier - Fandom
Genre: Abuse, Blood, Choking, Corruption, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Mild Gore, Mind Control, Psychological Horror, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-01-29 15:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12634203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsreonInfusion/pseuds/Asreoniplier
Summary: Dark probably did this every night, didn’t he? Pick someone out of the crowd, make them feel chosen,special. And then he would break them.You just got lucky that tonight it’s your turn. And once he's sunk his claws into you, he's not about to let go.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey. Hi. So. I've unanon'ed myself now, and I've got a separate pseudonym for all the stuff I'm gonna be posting for youtube fandoms, but. To anyone who subscribed to my main account and suddenly got this appearing, I am real sorry about that. I... I don't know how I got here. I feel very deep down the rabbit hole. 
> 
> Anyway. This was _meant_ to but only a one-shot, but... I got carried away. Feel free just to read the first chapter as a standalone, because that was the original intention for it anyway.
> 
> **EDIT TO ADD:** I _was_ attempting to crosspost to this to wattpad, 'cause I heard the fandom is pretty active over there, but underestimated the fact it's very popularity based and as a new author there my fic is as good as invisible and there was really no point even trying. However. In the process of trying to sort shit out for that site, I had to make a cover for the story, and it'd be a shame to waste it, so. I figured I might as well put it here.
> 
> Artwork is a commission from and used with permission of Sam Bloom (https://sambloom.tumblr.com), there's links and a copy of the original artwork on [this post](https://asreoniplier.tumblr.com/post/181750037986/read-on-wattpad-ao3-summary-dark-probably).

You’ve never been more terrified of dinner and a date.

It’s not necessarily because of the man in front of you, although that is certainly a contributing factor. He looks… suave, for the time being. Controlled. He’s wearing that deliciously form-fitting suit, speaking smoothly, smiling. He knows he’s a damn charmer.

And that’s what terrifying. That Dark is even keeping up the façade – that means that he wants something.

Just running into him you could have handled. Since you’ve clearly made some very poor life decisions to even end up encountering Dark in the first place. But you _know_ what he’s like. What he’s capable of. It’s stupid to imagine you ever had any chance to stand up against the full weight of that vengeful, seething power, but at least you would have stood against him at all.

At least you would have stood against him, instead of feeling yourself being charmed in spite of everything.

You stare at the table, keeping your head down as much as possible. Stabbing viciously at the delicate spread of meats on your plate.

He’s hard to ignore. He has that… _presence_ about him. It’s alluring, but raises the hairs on the back of your neck at the same time. Despite that, you do your best to pretend he’s not there. Just get through the meal and get the hell out, that’s what you tell yourself.

You’re so concentrated on trying not to think about him that you don’t even noticed he’s stopped talking until it’s too late.

He reaches out, curling a finger beneath your chin and raising your head to finally face him. You jolt at the contact, letting out a surprised gasp; his touch is cold as ice. That smile he directs at you makes your heart flip.

“There is no need to be shy,” he says. “Look at me.”

You swallow. Hard. There’s something hypnotising about his eyes, the depth and the darkness held behind them.

“I’d rather not.” Your voice comes out a little shaky, a little more breathy than you would have liked, but firm.

He still won’t let go of your chin, and now his thumb is stroking tenderly along your jaw. His gaze drinks you in, as if he’s captivated by you, can’t look away. It’s… flattering.

It’s also an act. The whole damn thing is an act and you know it. Dark could have chosen anyone; probably does choose anyone. Another victim every night. A million willing fans ready to walk right into his hands.

And you’re going to end up one of them.

“What do you want?” you ask.

He chuckles, and the sound of it send shivers up your spine. Although he keeps his voice light, there’s a deeper edge to it, something sinister curling beneath the surface. “Why do you assume I want anything more that the pleasure of your company? I have missed you, after all. Very much.”

“Bullshit.” You didn’t mean to say that out loud, but you don’t regret it either. “You don’t know me. Why the hell would you have missed me? Why would you want to spent time with me? I’m nobody, I’m nothing to you.”

“Well. Now is the perfect opportunity for us to get to know one another.” He lowers his hand, reaching out to brush his fingers against the back of your hand where it rests on the table.

You can only shake your head. He’s doing that charming thing again, but, hey, funny thing. Turns out self-esteem issues are more powerful than Dark’s allure.

You meet his eyes, full of your own conviction this time. “I am worth _nothing_ to you. I have nothing to offer. Unless there’s something specific you want from me, you wouldn’t be wasting your time just hanging around with some plain old loser. So cut the crap and tell me what you’re after, or just let me fucking go.”

Even though he smiles, it’s enough to make him fall silent for a moment. He’s planning his next move, you can see it. Either he can keep playing up the suave, charming demeanour to try to win you over, or he can cut straight to the true matter at hand. Whatever that may be. You’re not sure you want to know.

Dark tilts his head, cracking his neck, and your stomach flips again. _God_ , he looks sexy when he does that.

(You scowl at yourself for even having that thought; it’s calculated, it’s all calculated. He knows what he does to people.)

When he smiles at you again, it’s not a reassuring sight.

“You think so little of yourself. And yet you have spirit; I appreciate that. Enough so that I am going to offer you one last choice.”

“Unless one of those choices is leaving right now, I’m not interested.”

His touch on your hand tightens and he grips your wrist. The brush of his fingertips before was meant to flirt, to charm, to lower your guard; now he’s holding you captive.

Fear trickles down your spine like icy drop of water, and you can hear your own breathing grow faster and more ragged. You should have run while you had a chance.

“Choice one. We can continue to enjoy a pleasant evening together. I can take you anywhere you want to go, I can make you _believe_ anything. If you would like me to show you how it feels – to be special, to be worthy of my attention – I can certainly provide.”

You close your eyes for a moment. You’re not even going to consider it; you dare not. It’s a little too close to the lonely ache you’ve spent so long burying for your whole life, and you’re _not_ about to let Dark see any sign of weakness.

“Basically, you just spend the whole time lying to me, great,” you summarise flippantly for him.

“Choice two.” His smile grows wider, showing too many teeth now. It’s unnerving. That dark undertone is back in his voice; the edges of the room seem to start fading out, creaking as if the whole weight of the world is on them. His grip around your wrist is like iron. “I take you where you _don’t_ want to go, and feed off your misery and suffering just like this.”

Your eyes widen, the butterflies in your stomach turning leaden. “…What?”

The world lurches around you, the restaurant you thought you were in fading out into violent black. All that’s left is your table; the flowers wither and rot away in their vase, the remains of your meal heave and burst into a writhing mess of insects scurrying across the tablecloth. You yelp and jump back, your chair skittering away.

Then it’s gone.

The restaurant, the table, Dark. It’s like standing in a void, deathly still and empty. There’s no sound except for your own rapid breathing, and that ringing in your ears.

“Dark…?”

Even seeing him would be better than this… _nothing_. This is place where you know you were never meant to see; it’s not just a lack of light, of substance, but an absence of _existence_. If he were to leave you here…

Fuck.

“Dark!” You take a moment to try to steady your voice. “I didn’t even make my choice!”

“I’m tired of giving people choices,” Dark sneers. You can’t see him, but you can hear his voice. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once, echoing in your mind. He’s not holding back any more. His voice is inhuman, distorted and layered and terrifying.

The ringing in your ears reaches a fever pitch; you’re afraid it’s enough to make your eardrums burst. It’s enough to bring you to your knees. Maybe you cry out, but you can barely even hear yourself think.

Then it stops, and you choke back a small sob of relief.

Dark is standing in front of you, and you’re on your hands and knees at his feet. He still looks as composed as ever, pristine and refined in his immaculate suit, but now you can see the red and blue echoes of his form bleeding out.

He reaches down and grasps your jaw, a violent imitation of how tenderly he’d lifted your head before. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” he says, smooth as honey. “No more pretending. No more _games_.”

You try to struggle away from him. “What do you _want_?!”

“I have already told you that.”

It’s hard to focus when your heart is pounding and Dark’s holding your jaw in an ice-cold, bruising grip. But… that’s right. He said it before. ‘Feed off your misery and suffering’, your mind recalls mockingly.

Because that’s what he did. He fed off the attention that people poured out to him, capturing their minds and their hearts and then bleeding them fucking dry.

He did do this every night, didn’t he? Probably. Pick someone out of the crowd, make them feel chosen, _special_. And then he would break them.

You just got lucky that tonight it’s your turn.

“Let me go,” you demand weakly. You really don’t want to find out what misery and suffering entails. Maybe he wouldn’t even need to do anything. Just leaving you here, trapped in this horrific emptiness, would be enough to drive you insane before long.

He does, in a way. Dark releases his hold on you and you slump back down, shuddering. He stares down impassively.

“Perhaps,” he says. “If you put on a show.”

“A… show of what?”

His smile is terrifying now, far more demon than the man he masquerades as. “Lay bare your soul to me. Break yourself into pieces. _Let me in._ ”

That is the last thing you’d ever want to do. It’s not like you have any choice in the matter, Dark’s seen to that, but everything in you recoils in horror at the thought.

“Go fuck yourself,” you spit at him.

And he _laughs_. It’s the most beautiful, cruel sound you’ve ever heard.

He straightens out his suit jacket and cocks his head towards you. He doesn’t even need to do anything. His control of this place is absolute. He just stands there and stares as the inky darkness drags you down.

It’s like quicksand, like drowning; fighting it only pulls you down faster, no matter how much you yell and push against it.

Then everything is gone again. The darkness has swallowed all your senses, so thick it feels like you’re going to choke on it. You do choke on it, just for moment.

You sit there and just breathe for several long seconds, trying to get your bearings.

This is… bad. There’s no other way to look at it. How the hell are you ever supposed to get out of this place? And even though Dark may be gone for the time being, you very much doubt he’s gone entirely. You can still feel his presence. It’s there, in the back of your mind, seeping like poison through your veins.

Shakily, you push yourself to your feet. You don’t know where you think you’re going to go, but anything is better than just sitting there.

It’s cold. No, not quite; it’s not like a sensation of temperature, just… absence. The absence of warmth and of life. Walking through this place is like walking through an icy fog bank. It curls around you, smothers you, drains the warmth from you.

You walk for what feels like an age, almost trancelike. You keep telling yourself, over and over again, _don’t think_. Because you have a feeling you know what this place is. And you know that if you think, some of those thoughts might not be your own.

But it’s impossible to hold off forever. What else is there to do, when the world outside you is so bitterly, terrifyingly empty?

With each passing minute, the fear grows inside you. What if you die here? Or just end up trapped forever?

God. You don’t want to die. There’s so much that you could do! So much you haven’t done yet...

Actually, you haven’t really done anything at all, have you? If you died now, it would just be kind of pathetic. So much potential. You could have done so much, anything if you but your mind to it. But you never did. Because, what? You were afraid you were going to fail? Afraid you were never good enough?

It all seems so stupid in this place. You let out a bitter laugh that dies hollowly in your own ears.

That’s the worst of it. You _could_ have been so much. So much more than you were. No, you were never worthless because of a lack of talent, or a lack of potential. You were worthless because you _never used any of it._ Worthless enough that it would be better if you didn’t exist. Stupid little waste of space.

You clench your hand into a fist, fingernails digging into your palm.

It’s this place, playing tricks on you. Echoing your own thoughts from darker times, twisting them in your mind like a knife in a wound.

Not listening doesn’t fucking help. Even if you block it out, you can still _feel_ it. The aching in your chest, the hollow bitterness, the self-hatred rising like bile in your throat.

It would have been so much better just to let Dark manipulate you into thinking he cared about you than have him manipulate you into feeling like _this_.

Breathe. Just… just keep breathing.

Maybe you’re better than that now, but the echoes of it, the doubts, they never fade.

Maybe you were better off dead all along.

Gritting your teeth, you break into a sprint. It’s _stupid_ , there’s nowhere to go, and you can’t outrun your own thoughts. (No, you’ve tried that one before, haven’t you?) But maybe it will make you feel alive; the pounding of your heart, your breath in your throat, the aching in your legs.

You sprint until your knees wobble and give way beneath you.

Slumped on the ground, gasping for air, you finally spot something breaking through the bleak nothingness.

It looks like a star. Stars, maybe. The tiniest fragment of light.

You stumble towards it, exhausted now. It’s not just the physical fatigue; every part of you is tired, mind and spirit and body and soul.

It takes another age. How long have you been here now? It feels like hours on end. Maybe days. But it’s there, the light at the end.

Finally, it takes shape. Cracks seep through the darkness, faintly illuminating the shattered pieces of a mirror.

You can see yourself in it as you approach. You look about as good as you feel; like this place has drained everything from you. Pale, sallow. No light in your eyes.

But light… there’s light through the other side of the mirror. You press your hands to the glass and try to peer through. It’s hard to see, but it looks like there’s something on the other side. Somewhere. A house?

You bang your fist against the mirror – no, that’s stupid. As if anyone would come to let you out, even if there was a way they could. You try to pry your fingernails into the cracks in the glass, but of course that does nothing either.

With no other possible options and hope fading rapidly, you do the only thing you can think of.

You slam the side of your fist against the mirror, as hard as you can. Pounding again and again as the glass moans in protest and finally shatters beneath the impact. Pain slices white hot through your hands and arms, glass shards raining down on them and leaving lacerations in their wake.

You don’t stop. You can’t stop; all that’s left is desperation, a fervour beyond your control. You can feel blood running down your arms and tears running down your cheeks. You don’t know how they got there.

Tearing at the glass, your stomach sinks. There’s nothing behind it. Nothing but more of the endless black. You rip every single shard from its place, uncaring of how it cuts into your fingers and palms, yet still...

Nothing. Of course it’s fucking _nothing._

You sink down to your knees and yell in frustration. There’s shattered fragments of glass everywhere, and blood running freely from the open wound those fragments left. There’s cuts on your face too; you can taste the blood trickling down past your lips. Tears, too. Dark probably likes that combination, you think with a bitter snort.

It’s pitch black again now. All the light faded when you destroyed the mirror. But the shards are still there; you feel them out blindly with your fingertips until you find a large, jagged one that fits nicely in your palm.

It’s a crazy idea that floats in your mind. Stupid, probably. But you get the feeling Dark doesn’t want you dead. No; death here doesn’t mean the same thing. Death would be too easy. Can’t feed off someone’s suffering if they’re gone for good.

So you slit your wrists with the shard of the mirror, crying out with the pain and immediate horror of what you’ve done.

Fuck. Oh, fuck.

The blood is gushing out way too quickly. Your breath is ragged again, heart pounding and ears ringing, and—you didn’t mean it, you didn’t fucking mean it, you just wanted to—

There’s a slow clap from behind you.

You jolt and turn around to see Dark, just standing there with his arms behind his back, looking _amused_ by the whole thing.

“Congratulations,” he says, the words bitingly dry. “You lasted almost half an hour in my domain.”

“Shut the _fuck_ up,” you hiss at him. Your breath is rattling in your chest and your head is spinning, and you’ve never hated anyone more than you do in that moment.

The mirror shard is still in your hand. You tighten your grip on it and lunge with as much strength as you can muster, the jagged tip of it aimed straight for Dark’s jugular.

He catches you in midair. His fingers close around your throat and he slams you backwards; there shouldn’t even be anything there, but it’s his domain and he can do whatever the hell he wants with it, so you end up impacting something solid anyway. Something cracks sickeningly and you scream.

You can’t breathe. He’s holding you in the air, pinned against a wall you can’t even see. His grip is like an iron vice around your throat, and no matter how much you choke and sob you can’t get any air. Your lungs heave futilely, pain stabbing through your ribs.

You claw at him, trying to pull his hand away. It does nothing. He’s strong, god, so much stronger than you. You could never have fought him, even without having been weakened by blood loss and the lack of air.

The whole time he’s just watching you, leaning back as if he doesn’t want to get your blood on his suit, those dark eyes drinking in your pain.

Slowly, your struggles fade. Your body doesn’t have enough strength left for that.

It’s… it’s over, isn’t it? Even if he allows you to breathe, there’s still too much blood loss. Your arms are completely slick with it, it’s soaking into your clothes. And it’s not like Dark is going to fucking help you.

It’s too much to take, and you’re too weak to keep fighting it.

You close your eyes and shatter.

It’s so quiet you barely notice it, but you think you hear a hum of pleasure from Dark.

“Perfect,” he says. “Your kind are always so much prettier when they’re broken. Now—” his other hand cups your cheek, slides back to thread into your hair, “–all you need is to let me in,” he murmurs.

There’s nothing left to resist him. He tilts your head back and presses your lips together and you let him.

The kiss tastes of your blood.

You shudder beneath his touch. His presence is overwhelming like this; writing itself into your fractured thoughts, crawling beneath your skin. Consuming you until only an empty shell remains. A puppet; _his_ puppet. You moan.

He lets you go, and you collapse to the floor like a broken doll. Your own blood pools around you. You stare straight ahead with glazed eyes, and he steps into view in front of you.

“You were correct, by the way,” Dark says, casually tossing his hair back into place. Back to his charming little façade, now he’s content he’s got his way. “Death does not work the same in this place. I will return you to your body, and you can continue to go about your pathetic human existence. Do try not to kill that one – a dead puppet is of no use to me.”

He leans down, taking your hair in his fist and yanking your head back. “And do not forget,” he says, the venom and distortion back in his voice in an instant. “This world is mine, and _you_ are mine. _I_ am in control now.”

His cold-eyed, ruthless smile is the last thing you see before you black out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn’t actually intend to write a second part to this, but I guess my brain had _ideas_. Whoops. I wasn’t too sure about posting it though, because it might be a little disappointing after the first chapter if the psychological horror aspect was what people enjoyed most in that?? 
> 
> This one is a little different - it still has some of those elements, especially at the start, but then kind of just becomes more about the (light-ish??) physical torture throughout. I mean, I dig both, but that might not be the same for everyone. Still, hopefully it’s just as fun to read!
> 
>  **Content warnings for this chapter:** Mind control, knives, blood, whips (in a non-sexual, non-kinky way; think more like a corporal punishment situation), branding

It’s not been long since the weather turned, but long enough to remind you why winter sucks balls. You’d rather be anywhere other than outside right now. Home would be ideal; home with your bed and a nest of blankets and stupid shit to laugh at on the internet. Unfortunately, braving the cold is the price you have to pay to get there.

Which is why there really should be no reason for you to stop. And yet your footsteps begin to slow of their own accord.

For a moment you don’t understand why, until your stomach twists as well. It’s the way your pulse quickens, the ringing in your ears, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end. The way you feel around _his_ presence.

Your heart catches in your throat, even as you scowl and remind yourself it’s _not fucking real_. This has gone on for months; the better part of a year, almost. Feeling your skin crawl, feeling watched, called, controlled. Jumping at shadows, hearing the echoes of his voice in your head. Seeing his reflection out of the corner of your eye when you glance at the mirror.

None of it is ever real, and it never will be.

You were actually getting really good at ignoring it, at pushing past and moving on with life without wasting your time and attention on the bullshit tricks your mind tries to play on you. It’s been weeks, even, since the last time you spared a thought for Dark.

This is by far the worst attack in a long while. The pressure around your chest feels tight enough that you’re struggling to breathe, the ringing in your ears loud enough to drown out your own frantic pulse.

You duck into an alley, just to get out of the street and have your little breakdown somewhere semi-private. You’ve been here before a hundred times; all you need to do is wait it out.

It feels so fucking _visceral_ , though. How it crawls beneath your skin like a physical touch.

You slump back against the wall, hands tangling into your hair and clutching at your scalp as if you can physically hold your mental state together. The biting cold chills your fingers to the bone, but you can’t bring yourself to let go.

You start wondering about better cover, if maybe you should brave the risk of people to make it somewhere with heating, when the side door of the building next to you swings open.

That’s… that’s freaky. Every instinct knows that an unmarked, abandoned warehouse equals bad news. A side door to such a building, secluded in a dark alleyway, opening of its own accord? That’s the sort of bullshit that happens in horror games or murder mysteries. And, ideally, you’d prefer not to get murdered.

Yet still you find yourself standing up, staring at the open door like a moth drawn to a flame. No, not just drawn. Called. It’s calling you, controlling you.

The last thing you want to do is step into the darkness. Because you know exactly who’s going to be waiting for you in there.

You don’t have a choice, though.

The room isn’t what you expect at all. It’s—it’s an exact replica of your therapist’s office, like it was lifted straight from your memories. It probably was.

Moving on autopilot, under the influence of whatever this spell is, you take a seat on the worn couch and place your bag at your feet. You unravel your scarf and take off your coat and jumper, folding them over the arm of the couch.

And Dark is standing across the room, watching you with cold eyes the entire time.

For a moment, your heart skips a beat at seeing him. It’s not surprise – you know what his presence feels like, you knew who was pulling the strings from the start. It’s feeling _special_. He’s already had you once; you didn’t think you’d ever see him again after that. But he’s picked you out to visit again.

That’s really, _really_ not a good thing.

The heart-fluttering feeling dies rapidly. His expression is like ice, lips threatening to turn up into a sneer at any moment. He’s not bothering the play the suave, charming role at all; he’s still wearing his signature suit, of course, but there’s no tie today and the top buttons of his shirt are undone. His hair falls messily across his face.

His aura has always been intimidating, but now it’s downright terrifying. Every fibre of his being emanates cold fury.

You can only pray it’s not directly at you specifically. You’re probably going to suffer for it either way though.

“Dark…”

“Oh. I’m flattered you remember me.” His voice is pure venom.

Shit. It does seem like it’s you that he’s mad at. But then again, maybe that’s a stupid thing to think – what could you have possibly done to piss him off so much?

“What am I doing here?” you ask, voice shaking just a little.

He stalks forward, like a goddamn predator, and you’re the rabbit caught in the headlights. “I do not tolerate disobedience,” he says.

For a moment, you can only stare at him in stunned silence. Then your expression and resolve hardens. There is nothing more infuriating than having false accusations flung at you, being blamed for something you didn’t do. And disobedience? What the fuck did you disobey?

“I have done _nothing_ ,” you hiss. “You’re the one who picked me up out of nowhere and decided it would be a fun time to _torture_ me in my own head. All I’ve done since is try to piece myself back together and move on!”

There’s a flash of anger in his eyes, and for a moment the shell breaks. It’s not just the aura around him you see, but the phantom outline of another person – another creature – glitching behind him while Dark himself distorts. It’s just for a moment, but long enough that you see sightless eyes and a mouth contorted into a scream, and you press yourself back into the couch as if that’s going to help you get further away from the horrifying visage.

He gets his temper back under control. Mostly. Dark’s hand twitches at his side, and you flinch.

“Precisely,” he says, each syllable enunciated clearly. Strained. “You thought you could forget me. _I_ am the one in control. _I_ am the one you give your attention to.”

Your attention… _oh_. You realise what he means, now. Why it’s important. It’s because Dark was never meant to exist in this world; he bled over through the void. But the more people who thought of him – the more attention he received – the deeper entangled he could become into this reality. It gave him power.

And Dark was not one to be denied the power he considered to be his right.

You want to put much distance as you can between yourself and Dark’s looming, thunderous presence, but there’s nowhere left for you to go.

“I’m just one person. What the hell does it matter? You’ve got a thousand more fans out there you could sink your claws into – millions, probably. I’m nothing to you.”

It’s obvious in the way he looks at you, like you’re a distasteful specimen beneath a glass slide. You really are nothing to him. It hurts more than it should.

“Yet you apparently think you’re worth enough to try to take back control of your life. Did you not understand, when I said you were mine? You belong to _me_. It’s more than a little insulting to have some impudent brat like yourself attempt to deny me what I have already claimed.”

He turns his back on you, and you slump against the couch cushions. Just being released from his gaze is a relief; the cold anger in his eyes felt like it could have pierced right into your soul if he’d kept looking at you that way much longer.

The room begins to glitch, the façade cracking and shattering. You’re not surprised – you figured it was an illusion from the start – but it’s still sickening to see the world lurch and fade out in front of your eyes.

The truth behind it is more like what you expected. The couch is real, though far older and more stained and looks like it was abandoned with the rest of the place. Because _this_ is the building you walked into; desolate and neglected. It’s concrete floors and concrete walls, all empty, echoing space. Water drips from the rusted pipes crawling across the ceiling and the upper edges of the room. There are windows, higher up than would be possible to see out of or in to, that let in a greyed, dingy hint of light through their filthy glass. It’s just about enough to see by.

“It seems you need a reminder of what my control is capable of,” Dark says. Softly, dangerously.

He gestures to the side. There’s a stack of broken old pallets there, a shoddy semblance of a table in the same place you’d been imagining the desk. The state of it isn’t important. What is, and where your gaze immediately fixates, is the knife that’s sitting on top of it.

“So why don’t you try killing yourself again? I believe this was your preferred method last time.”

Oh, no. Hell no.

That is the last thing you’d want to do anyway, but here? Like this? This is _real_. The only reason you even survived last time was because you were in Dark’s domain, in the void, where death doesn’t mean the same thing. This time there’s no loophole. If he hurts you, if he kills you, if he makes you kill _yourself_ …

Your skin crawls, heartbeat and breath both quickening rapidly. There’s a ringing in your ears. It’s like before, the same way you felt in the alley, but _worse._ You can’t block it out at all.

It is exactly like before, you realise. The way you’d walked through that door even though every instinct screamed it was a terrible idea. As you stand up, numb, your body moving without any direction from you – actively _against_ the directions you’re screaming in your head – it hits you. He’s not just in your head, able to make you see illusions and twist your thoughts. He can control your _every fucking movement_ if he wants.

And he just stands there and watches as you reach for the knife.

You can’t even speak. You want to shout at him, scream, anything. You’d even accept being able to cry and beg him to stop; it’s better than not being able to resist at all.

Your fingers curl around the hilt and the knife feels heavy as lead in your grip. You raise your other arm, wrist upwards in front of you.

He’s fucking taunting you. He makes you lower just the tip of the knife until it’s pressing an indent into the fragile skin of your wrist. Makes you trace it along the surface, right over a vein. You can feel every touch of it, the blade of the knife cold and deadly sharp.

You can feel tears prick at the corners of your eyes. You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to watch while he controls your body like a puppet and makes you slit your own wrists. Your breathing is too shallow and far too rapid, close to panic. And all the while Dark just stands there with his arms behind his back, observing you, cold and impassionate.

Enough of the games. You raise the knife for a true strike, then bring it down. In your mind you scream. But you can’t break out of it, you can’t stop it.

The blade freezes in midair, bare millimetres from piercing your skin.

That wasn’t your doing. With the amount of momentum the knife had, you couldn’t have stopped yourself even if you’d managed to wrest back control at that point. No. This was Dark’s plan all along; not to kill you, but to prove just how absolute his control was.

Still under his control, you lower the knife until it gently penetrates the flesh. Not deep, not enough to put you seriously at risk, but he doesn’t let you stop until you’ve carved a blood red line down the length of your forearm. Straight as an arrow; your hands didn’t even shake.

Dark smiles coldly at you, satisfied, and you collapse to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut.

You immediately drop the knife as though it’s searing hot, clutching your injured arm to your chest. The sound you make is somewhere between a sob and a scream. Tears prick at the corner of your eyes and you’re trembling, gasping, but worst of all is the stomach-churning, visceral horror of understanding just what Dark is capable of.

He takes a step towards you, and you immediately flinch backwards.

“Okay!” you shout, voice cracking. “I get it. I get it, you don’t have to—”

“I’m glad we’ve reached an understanding.” He straightens his suit out. He seems more in control of his temper now, but there’s still too much hardness and anger in his eyes. He cracks his neck as he looks down at you, a terrifying smile playing at the corners of his lips. It might have been charming if you couldn’t see the promise of pain behind it.

“There is still the matter of your disobedience.”

Your blood turns to ice.

“Get up,” Dark says. It’s a command, but he’s not controlling you this time. He’s expecting you to obey.

It’s probably not worth the suffering if you don’t.

You stumble slightly as you rise to your feet, hands still shaking. Dark walks ahead of you, obviously expecting you to follow, and you do for the time being. Your mind is racing, though, desperately trying to formulate some way out. If you run, he’ll only catch you in an instant. Where could you even go when he’s so deeply embedded in your head?

“Stand against the wall. Back to me.”

Your stomach flips. You don’t like where this is going.

“What—” you try to ask, but his grip around the back of your neck silences you. You gasp at the contact; you forgot how cold his touch is. Not so much physically cold, but like it could suck all the warmth and life from you if he held on too long.

He takes your wrist in his other hand and you instinctively try to jolt away. It does nothing to loosen his grip. But nor does it seem to bother him. Thankfully. Instead he neatly wraps several loops of rope around your wrist, and your apprehension grows exponentially.

“What the hell is this?” you demand.

He tightens the rope enough to make into your flesh, and you wince. He does them both, securing the ropes to the pipes against the wall overhead so your wrists are suspended, head height on either side of you. Blood trickles sluggishly down your forearm from the gash left there.

You’re really regretting your decision not to try running. Especially when you feel the touch of that knife again, against the back of your neck this time.

Before you even have a chance to jerk away, Dark cuts downwards in one quick, fluid movement. You cry out in alarm – shock, rather than pain, because the blade barely scratched you. It’s sliced right through the back of your shirt instead, and Dark uses the flat of the knife to flip the torn fabric out of the way.

The hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Partially because of the sudden cold of the frigid air against your now-exposed back, mostly because _what the fuck_. Not that any situation involving Dark is a good one, but this… you’re tied up and feel ridiculously vulnerable with that amount of skin exposed, and you have no idea where Dark is going with this. The uncertainty – and the worst-case scenarios your mind conjures up unbidden – leave you feeling nauseous.

You clench your hands into fists, subtly pulling against the ropes. They’re not going anywhere.

“Dark…” you start, desperately trying not to panic. If he could just tell you what the _hell_ this is about…

The thought is interrupted by a sound like a gunshot.

“Shit!” you gasp. Your head jerks round, eyes wide. You didn’t think Dark was particularly inclined to use guns – that’s more Wil’s speciality – but then that’s probably because it wasn’t a gun. That sound was a whip crack, and suddenly your position makes a lot more sense.

“Oh, _fuck_.”

You don’t want to look, but at the same time you have to know. He’s moved to stand beside you for a moment, maybe watching your reaction, you don’t fucking know. But you can see now what he has in his hands.

Yeah. It’s a whip. Which is an improvement over the possibility of a gun, but that’s before you notice that there’s a knot in the cracker at the very end, with what looks like a barb tied into it.

A whip you could handle. Maybe. But there’s a goddamn metal _hook_ on the end of it – just a tiny one, sure, and it doesn’t even look that sharp. But that’s still fucked up, and is absolutely going to fuck you up.

“Dark, don’t do this. Please.” You’re asking, not begging, even if your voice did some out shaky as hell. At least that’s what you tell yourself.

“One lash for every day you pushed me aside, _mocked_ me. That seems fair.”

That seems the _opposite_ of fair. How the hell could he even judge that? What counts as pushing him aside? Every day you forced yourself to get up and get on with life even after the weeks of nightmares of drowning in blackness and warm blood bubbling from gaping wounds and shattered mirrors and red and blue swimming in your vision?

He cracks the whip beside your head once more; a warning. The next time the whip strikes, white-hot pain blossoms between your shoulder blades and you cry out.

Fuck. All you can do is close your eyes and grit your teeth. The intensity of it fades fast, at least; the sharp, suffocating bite of the initial strike fading out to a burning ache. Only you don’t have time to get used to it, because the second the pain from one lash becomes bearable, there’s another new strike to take its place.

Some of them are worse than others, when the barb catches and _rips_ and you can only scream. It makes bile rise in your throat, and there’s moments you’re convinced just one more strike will be enough to make you throw up.

That never quite happens, but that’s about the limit to your luck.

You quickly end up with tracks of tears seared against your face, and you can only breathe in shallow, sobbing gasps. Your knees feel weak, like they could give way at any moment. They do, at one point, and you finally understand the purposes of the ropes when they’re the only thing holding you up. But that’s even _worse_ , because your muscles burn and the ropes chafe viciously around your wrists, so you have to force yourself back to your feet before your shoulders are wrenched from their sockets.

It fades out into a haze. You don’t remember where you are or why or what you did to piss off Dark. It just _hurts_ and he won’t _stop_.

You can only pray that it’s not as bad as it feels, because how it feels is like your whole back has been torn to shreds. Every nerve screams agony at you, and you can feel the blood oozing out from the gashes in your flesh. Your back feels like it’s on fire, but everywhere else – your hands, your face – feel far too cold and almost clammy.

At some point, you resort to begging. “Please” and “don’t” and “Dark”, not that you can make out the words with how broken and mumbled they are. Your head is spinning and your ears ringing; not particularly because of Dark this time, though that too, but more of a ‘probably about to pass out’ type of ringing.

You’re not sure if it’s because he’s reached whatever arbitrary number he decided on, or because Dark can tell you’re at your limit, but the lashes finally stop.

He uses the knife to cut through the ropes just above where they’re bound around your wrists. The moment you’re free you sink down to your knees, head resting against the wall in front of you. Your fingers are shaking almost too hard to unravel the remains of the rope; when you finally manage it, you find the skin beneath raw and puffy and inflamed an angry red. Painful to the touch. You didn’t even realise how much you’d been pulling against them.

You stay like that for a long time, choking on your own breaths before they start to even out, trembling violently. You wrap your arms around yourself like it’ll help hold you together.

The pain burns, a fierce, throbbing ache, but duller now. Bearable, at least.

It’s not over, though. Dark is still there. He’s not paying full attention to you; he has more planned, he’s preparing something. And all you can think is _god, please, no more_.

When he returns, though, the charming façade is back in place. The red and blue auras are barely visible around him, not crackling the way they do when his control starts to slip. He’s taken all his anger out on you, and now he’s back to acting like nothing even happened.

Maybe you were wrong. Maybe that was it; maybe you’ve taken your punishment, and Dark is satisfied you’ve learned your lesson, and you’ll be allowed to leave. That’s too much to hope for, though.

“I have one last task for you. A gift,” he says.

Whatever it is, you don’t want it. But you also don’t want to push your luck and make him mad again.

He actually helps you to your feet like some kind of fucking gentleman, as if he weren’t the reason you were collapsed in a trembling, wrecked heap on the floor in the first place. You stumble, knees still too weak to stand, and end up half leaning against him. The contact makes you balk.

The second the couch is within reach, you practically shove yourself away from him and shakily sit down instead. You cling to the edge of the couch cushions with a white-knuckled grip.

Dark crooks a finger beneath your chin and lifts your gaze to meet his. You give him a defiant look in return, but he only smirks. “I would suggest you stay very still,” he says lowly.

Your stomach sinks. Well, that sounds ominous as hell.

“Dark—” you start, but he’s already turned his back to you. You try to track his movements, figure out what’s coming. He picks something up; a piece of metal? Blue light flickers angrily as he heats the end of the metal rod until is glowing white-hot, and your eyes widen.

Oh, _fuck_ _no_. That can’t possibly be what you’re imagining. ‘Cause the only thing you can think is that it’s a fucking _brand_ and—he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, what the fuck is that even?

He turns back to you, his smile charming and open but thoroughly unsettling. Even more unsettling is the burning metal at the end of the implement he’s holding.

“No!” you protest. He can’t, he fucking can’t—not only would that hurt like an absolute bitch, and you haven’t even recovered from the goddamn whip yet, it’s _permanent_. Whip marks will heal, but if he brands you, purposely marks you like you’re his fucking property—

He takes hold of the fabric of your torn shirt, pulling it forward to expose your left shoulder and collarbone.

“Since you seem prone to forgetfulness,” he says, and although he says it lightly you’re certain he’s mocking you, “perhaps a more tangible reminder would be appropriate.”

“Fuck you!”

Dark grips a fistful of your hair, tight enough to bring tears to your eyes, and guides your head out of the way. “Still,” he reminds you.

You don’t have time to react before the metal sears into your skin.

You scream, automatically trying to jerk away, but his grip holds you in place too well. The pain is beyond intense.

But it’s short lived, at least. It rapidly stops hurting, or feeling anything at all – and that’s even more terrifying, because it means he’s destroyed the nerve endings entirely. A third degree burn for sure.

You can’t stop the sob that bursts from your lips.

Dark hushes you, his deep voice oddly soothing. But it’s not over. Because that was just a single line, only the start of whatever design he has planned to mark you with. Oh, god. It’s even worse this way; you wish he’d done the whole thing at once, but now he’s reheating the thin edge of steel ready for another line and you clench your eyes shut. You know what’s coming and you don’t want to see it.

The second time isn’t any better. Pain flares in white-hot stars behind your eyelids – you don’t scream this time, but you can’t manage to choke back your broken groan.

The smell is the worst of it; you can smell your own flesh _burning_ and it makes your stomach turn.

You’re not sure when you started crying, but by the time it’s over your cheeks are soaked with tears. You didn’t bother counting how many times the process was repeated, creating some relatively simple but elegant pattern of Dark’s devising, but god, it felt like an eternity. And now you’re left with his mark scarred into you.

“Good,” Dark says approvingly.

You’re trembling again. You can’t stop trembling. You feel cold all over; when you feel anything at all because you’re also barely able to keep from dissociating entirely. Your breathing is rapid and far too shallow, eyes glazed. Probably dangerously close to going into shock.

So much so that you don’t notice Dark. You’re looking right through him, not able to focus or process your thoughts at all. You _see_ him slide his suit jacket from his shoulders, but don’t register the fact until he drapes the jacket over you instead and you jump in shock.

It helps, a little. It’s a poor substitute for an actual blanket, but you find yourself wrapping your arms around yourself and clinging to the lapels regardless. The fabric stings as it catches against the bloody, ragged mess that is your back right then, but it feels better than being exposed still.

He sits down next to you and wraps an arm around you, pulling you against his chest.

To say it takes you by surprise is an understatement, and you tense in his hold. Fury quickly takes over, and you struggle against him, trying vehemently to push away. How fucking _dare_ he?! He’s used you like a puppet, whipped you, branded you, and _now_ he wants to try and take care of you afterwards? What the fuck is that?!

No. It makes sense, in a twisted way. Because that’s his game, isn’t it? To break you into pieces, then put you back together with his fingerprints scarred all over your heart.

You’ll put yourself back together, thanks. You’re not about to let him act like he wants to help you _now_.

Except he doesn’t let go; not fighting you, but just holding on firmly, gently. And you’re not exactly in the best state. You exhaust yourself all too quickly, then fall limply against him.

“Let me see,” he says, as calmly as ever. He means the brand; he pushes the edge of the jacket away to reveal it fully, pink and raw, burned into the skin beneath your collarbone.

His fingertips brush against the mark he’s left, and you wince instinctively. You can’t really feel anything, but it still seems incredibly wrong for anyone to be touching a fresh burn, and it makes you squirm uncomfortably to think about it. Only his touch is cold; it’s cooling, oddly soothing against the inflamed, damaged skin.

Well, he seems pleased with his handiwork at least, you note bitterly. His expression is unusually… you don’t even know what that is, you’ve never seen warmth on his face before. Fondness?

Fondness for the result of all the pain he’s caused you, maybe. He’s so full of fucking bullshit. And you _know_ it, but here you are, letting him hold you against him because you’re too tired to bother fighting anymore.

Worse. You kind of like him holding you. You _need_ the comfort and security of human contact (you use the term ‘human’ loosely in relation to Dark) after everything he’s done to you; he’s taking advantage of that. There’s no one else to provide it for you, after all. Even if you weren’t here… you swallow a sour laugh. It’s a cruel irony that this is the first time you’ve managed to get just a damn hug in literal _months_. And it’s from Dark.

You’re so tired and hurt all over and you don’t want to play these games. “Just fuck off,” you mumble acidly against Dark’s shoulder.

He laughs; you feel it more than hear it. But he actually seems to take your words to heart. He stands, rearranging you so you’re lying on your side on the couch, and then you hear the echo of his footsteps.

You don’t know where he’s going, if he’s truly leaving, and frankly you don’t care. This new position is a great one; you curl your knees up into yourself, lift your hands to your head as if you can block the whole world out. Just breathe through the pain and the ache in your chest.

You hate the fact that some part of you misses his touch already.

You’re so tired. You know you need to get up, get home, try and fix yourself up as best you can. Maybe get some antiseptic cream on your back – though you’re not sure how you’re going to reach around to do that yourself – and cool water to run over the branding burns. But it’s so much easier just to stay lying down. You drift in and out of dozing a few times before you actually manage to sigh and force yourself to sit back up.

It’s not Dark’s jacket draped over your shoulders anymore; it’s your own coat that you left here earlier. That’s… that’s creepy, to think about him coming back and being right there next to you, and you weren’t even aware of it.

You shake the thought off. Whatever. You’re definitely alone now, and all you want is to get the hell away from this place.

Your shirt isn’t salvageable at all. The back is completely torn through down the centre; even when you try to pull it back over your shoulder and close the edges behind you, it immediately falls open again. In the end, you just have to throw your jumper on over the top of it, and then your coat over that.

Standing is a slow process. You feel dizzy at first, but once you’re on your feet you manage to get your bearings a little better. Hunching over, making yourself as small as possible, you hurry for the side door you came in from. The sooner you’re out of here the better.

The icy air outside is a relief; it bites at your lips, but it tastes like freedom.

Freedom. Hah. You don’t have much of that left. Because you get the distinct feeling Dark isn’t going to be content just leaving you – leaving your mind – alone. Especially now that… your fingers drift up to hover over where the brand aches beneath your clothes. Especially now that _that_.

Fuck.

Steeling yourself against the cold, you head out of the alley and back towards home. That’s all you can do for the time being. Whatever the future holds, whatever else Dark has planned for you, you’ll just have to deal with it then.

Dread settles like ice in the pit of your stomach.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't originally going to add this chapter here, or maybe just have it as a bonus chapter, because it started out down a thoroughly ridiculous and self-indulgent route in which I just wanted there to be hate kisses. Because hate kisses are fun. Mm.
> 
> But then it somehow went down a different path to what I was expecting. And it turned out that through this incident, however awfully it may have started, Dark actually ended up kind of coming to begrudgingly respect the reader character a little more. So in the end, it worked out quite important in terms of story and character development.
> 
> (I mean. That kind of implies there is actual development going on here, which wasn't intentional. I honestly have no idea where this is going; it was only ever meant to be the first chapter as a one-shot story, but I had so much fun writing it and so much inspiration that... I guess I just kept going, haha. It's all very unplanned.)
> 
> I don't want this to turn into an actual relationship between Darkiplier and the reader character at all - it is _way_ too fucked up to go down that route - so don't worry about that happening. Or, in the unlikely event things do start heading down that path, I'd want the relationship to be just as horrific and painful and abusive as everything else that's gone on so far. That could be fun. But anyway. That's not relevant to this chapter, and I'm rambling. Let's just go ahead with the story.
> 
>  **Content warnings:** alcohol use, usual unhealthy/manipulative/abusive undertones

You knew the game was stupid from the start. That was the whole point of a drinking game, after all; stupid, but fun. And it was. The evening has been a fucking _riot_. Chatting with friends online while you watched the same videos and took shots together, even while miles away. Maybe more shots than you were intending, but you’d always known there would be a lot of alcohol involved when you were setting up the rules.

You laughed until your stomach hurt, smiled until your cheeks were sore, forgot about everything else for a while.

So much fun. But it feels kind of sad, now that you’ve said your goodbyes and everyone has signed off. It’s evening, late but not late enough to necessitate sleeping just yet, and that leaves you sitting alone in your room, tipsy and uncoordinated and with nothing really to do.

You snort at the idea of trying to get any work done. It wouldn’t be any good in this state, and frankly you don’t want to. You flick through your phone. No messages or anyone to talk to. Play a game, maybe? That could either be hilarious or frustrating as hell, given the inevitable lack of coordination.

In the end, you end up not really doing anything. It’s kind of nice, in a weird way. Feeling floaty and warm. But the warmth fades, the longer you stay awake staring at the ceiling.

You take another shot or two to try and get the feeling back, but that doesn’t help.

Brains are such assholes, you decide. You were having a great time. You talked to people. Maybe you weren’t all that close to them, but you’re all friendly enough with each other. The empty feeling that’s starting to sink in, the hollowness and cold? That is totally unnecessary.

It’s becoming obvious where this is going. Ruminations and thoughts running in circles.

Ugh. Not where you wanted the evening to go.

It’s weird how people always talk about drinking to forget things. You managed to forget before, but that wasn’t the alcohol. That was being with people, hanging out, having fun. Alone, with nothing but a bottle for company? Not so much. You don’t tend to drink very much or very often, but when you do, you only find the memories are so worse.

The last thing you want to end up thinking about Dark, but that’s almost inevitable. It’s infuriating, in a way, that that’s where your mind always ends up going when you step back from the controls even a little. Especially since you’d been having such a good time up until then. Who the hell does he think he is to get so deeply embedded into your head, so tangled in your thoughts?

Fucker.

The bottle is pretty much empty; no sense keeping just that much. You drain the last of it and flop back onto your bed, irritated.

You’re annoyed at him, and annoyed at yourself because _you can’t stop thinking about him_. Of course, that’s all by design. He wants your attention and your fucking _obedience_. You mouth the word sarcastically to yourself.

Maybe you wouldn’t have ended up in such a shitty situation if you’d just been obedient in the first place. How would it have played out? That evening, with the dinner and the date.

You did have a choice, that night. And you made it long before Dark offered you one.

And now it keeps you awake wondering. What if you’d just let him manipulate you? What if you’d let him pretend to care? What if you’d had your date and been charmed, if you’d smiled and played along? If you’d let him touch your hand and brush your hair out of the way when it got unruly and give you that smile that never reached his eyes?

He was getting into your head either way. Wouldn’t it have been better to have just ended up pining over him, mourning a broken heart, compared to… whatever the hell _this_ is. Nightmares, jumping at shadows, and the scar of his brand on your shoulder.

There’s a part of you that wishes it had gone the other way. That you’d let him sweep you off your feet. He’s fucking handsome, no doubt about that. The way he could smile and act so charming, how he could make your heart flutter. That thing he does with his neck that can only be described as sexy as _hell_. The thought of him touching you is horrifying, but thrilling at the same time.

And that. _That_ right fucking there is why you shouldn’t drink. Because you do not need those thoughts. You do not want those thoughts. They might exist, but you – under normal circumstances – utterly refuse to acknowledge them because Dark is also a fucking eldritch abomination who gets off on hurting you and using you and shattering your soul.

You wonder for a moment if he would literally get off on that.

With a heartfelt, thoroughly irritated groan, you roll over and pull your pillow over your head.

You’re not thinking about this. You’re not thinking about _any_ of this. He’s an asshole and he’s caused you so much pain and you hate him. That doesn’t change just because he looks good.

“Fuck you,” you announce to the room. Man, that would be satisfying though. To just walk up to Dark and yell ‘fuck you’ in his face. Maybe punch him too. You’d only get the pain back a hundred times over, but still. You don’t even mind that as much as you should.

You can just picture it. His sardonic smile, the tilt of his head. The way he looks at you, like you’re a thing to be broken and used, but like he’s almost fond of you at the same time. You’ve never worked it out, whether that was for real, or just another manipulation tactic. But you thought you saw it for a moment after the last time, after he branded you.

You raise your fingers and trace over the brand. The damn thing took months to heal up completely, and the scar still stands out vividly against your skin. Marked as his.

It’s messed up as hell, but apparently you’re drunk enough to admit to yourself it’s also… kind of hot? Or it would be, if _Dark wasn’t such a fucking asshole_.

In the end, you’re pissed off at him for the shit he’s pulled, pissed off at yourself for still being here caught in his web, and pissed off for all the things that could have been but never will be. Maybe he was right all along. You should have let him care about you, even if it was pretend, because then at least someone would have.

Enough, just… enough. Your thoughts are going in circles and it’s not helping anything. The alcohol isn’t helping anything either. You just need to sleep it off and forget about it.

Sleep isn’t so easy to come by, though. You close your eyes and in the dark you hear his static, that high pitched ringing, the world creaking around you. You just want to forget him but all you see is his face. You feel lightheaded and too warm, only half in control of your body and oh, you’d be so easy to manipulate like this, wouldn’t you?

Eventually you’ve had enough, and you shove yourself back up to your feet. Except maybe you managed to fall asleep after all, because you think you’re standing but all you see around you is a void of empty blackness.

Great. Because you really needed a nightmare of being trapped in here again, in Dark’s domain.

It feels more… conscious, though, compared to the nightmares. You can only assume that’s another effect of the alcohol; vivid and hyper-realistic dreams. You hope it’s the alcohol. But the feeling begins to creep up on you, tightening around your throat, that maybe this is more...

No. It couldn’t be, right? Because on what fucking plane of existence would you ever find yourself wandering around in the void between worlds in your pyjama shorts and a tank top, drunk and swaying a little with each step? You’re not meant to be here.

Your laughter at the ridiculousness of the thought dies in your throat.

The darkness seems to tighten around you; sinking into the depths of it, the pressure increasing the further down you go, only you’re still standing perfectly in place.

You see the glow of those auras, the distortion in the fabric of reality, before you see him.

“Dark,” you say. You’re not sure what that greeting is; a laugh of disbelief, of horror, of absurdity.

Because he’s there now, standing in the inky blackness and entirely at home in it, amused and composed and suave as ever.

“I’m flattered,” Dark says, his voice a low rumble. “You’ve made such an effort to seek me out of your own accord.”

“What…?” Your mind ticks over far too slowly, but you gradually come to level a hard glower at him. “I didn’t do shit,” you defend.

“Is that so?”

God, you hate his smug face. Always so composed and in control. And what the fuck is he talking about? You seeking him out? Yeah, sure. If it’s to flip him off maybe.

Your drunk mind decides that’s actually a fantastic idea, and you raise both middle fingers at him.

And Dark _laughs_. You don’t think you’ve ever heard him laugh before; not like this, not a true laugh. The sound raises the hairs on the back of your neck, equal part terrifying and arousing. Like a lot of things about him.

“Shut the _fuck_ up,” you hiss. You’re not sure whether you’re talking to Dark or yourself, because you definitely, definitely did not just think the word ‘arousing’ in relation to that monster.

He walks towards you; stalks, like a predator, and you swear to yourself that this time you’re not going to be the goddamn prey. Except that you are. You so are.

Your breath catches in your throat, pulse picking up pace. He’s close enough that you could reach out and your fingertips would brush against him. He’s immaculate in his suit, and you’re suddenly acutely aware of how underdressed you are in comparison.

“What do you _want?_ ”

He tilts his head, and you feel like you’re pinned in place just by his gaze. “Isn’t that the question you should be asking yourself?” he says. Softly, with words designed to ease their way beneath your skin. “Aren’t you tired of fighting me? Together… we could do great things, you know.”

You’re too drunk for this. You can’t even identify the emotions welling up inside you, so violently you could choke on them. Everything you’ve ever felt for him; hate and pain and rage and the hollowness, the _longing_ to believe in him, in the false promises that someone could care about you.

Great things, he says. Instead of you being an absolute _nothing_. Oh, but he knows your weaknesses, doesn’t he?

You lunge for him, teeth bared. You stop with your hands wrapped around his throat, panting heavily, but barely putting any pressure in your grip. You want to hate him, you want to hurt him, but you _can’t_.

“What is it you want?” he says, returning the question to you in that low murmur that stirs butterflies in your stomach. That low murmur that reminds you of the things you want but refuse to even consider.

The want to give in and let him take control and to _enjoy it_ as he does. You know he’s only going to manipulate you, use you. And you want it anyway.

You’re so close to him like this. Your hands around his throat, faces so close he must surely be able to feel the warmth your ragged breaths.

It’s funny. You fought it so much, denied it, promised it would never, ever happen. If you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have had to protest against yourself so much, would you?

You’re the one who kisses him. It’s more an attack than anything else, all the aggression and bitterness and turmoil he’s sown in you. Let him finally fucking reap it.

He doesn’t respond, and you draw back. His lack of reaction maddens you even more than anything, and fuck it, _fuck it_ , this time you really are going to punch him in his goddamn face and—

Your fist swings out before you realised what you’re doing. He catches your wrist, and you cry out as the world spins around you. You hit the ground with a sharp gasp, the wind knocked out of you and Dark pinning you down, one hand around your wrist and the other around your throat now. The way it should be.

“What do you want?” he repeats, still as calmly as ever. As if you’re not struggling to shove him off you.

You slump against the ground. Can you blame the alcohol for this? You hate it, but being pinned down like this… fuck. Why are you _like_ this?! You can’t look him in the eyes, face flushing as you turn away.

You want him to kiss you. You want him to hurt you. You want him to choke you until your vision starts to fade out and you’re half afraid he’s going to kill you there and then. Shit. He’s terrifying, he’s going to break you, but you want it. To go up in flames and revel in the beauty of the destruction.

Fucking Christ, this is the last time you’re drinking. You’re beyond messed up like this.

“Fine,” you hiss, trying to cover how strained your voice sounds. “Go ahead and do it. Just fuck me up, I don’t _care_.”

You want him to, because maybe Dark is everything you deserve in your miserable, wasted life.

“There. Isn’t it better, being honest with yourself?”

You can’t answer, because now his mouth is pressed against yours. There’s nothing romantic about it; this is a stake of his claim and you can only moan as you let him in. His lips are bruising against yours, his grip around your throat leaving you lightheaded and struggling to breathe.

You hate it – you _should_ – except that you don’t.

You arch against him, trying to shove him off with your free hand. Like maybe you won’t loathe yourself so much for letting this happen if you pretend to struggle; as if you’re not kissing him back, as if his touch isn’t sending shivers running all through you.

The alcohol helps. You feel so overheated like this, so malleable. It’s so easy for him to manipulate you when you barely have any control over yourself in the first place. Your head lolls back as he pulls away, biting your lip and making you gasp as he breaks the kiss off.

He smirks at you, then stands and backs off.

Thank _god_. You need the space, need a moment to gather yourself and regain whatever composure you can. Because right now? You’re a mess, in multiple ways. You try to steady your shaking breaths, slowly clambering back to your feet. You can’t look him in the eyes. Your cheeks are feel like they’re flaming with a mix of anger and embarrassment, with shame at the fact you actually kind of _enjoyed_ that in some fucked up way.

He’s a good kisser.

Dark stands with his arms open at his sides, palms up. “Why don’t we take this opportunity,” he suggests, all charm, “to finally get to know each other better?”

You laugh hollowly. “As if you haven’t been in my head for... god, how long has it been? A year? More?”

He makes a small gesture, and the void shifts slightly. It creates a table in the midst of the sea of darkness; fancy tablecloth and fine cutlery, glasses and wine all laid out. You recognise it immediately. It’s exactly the same as the first night you met.

“We can try this all again,” he offers. “There are, after all, endless possibilities here. I’ve never wanted to hurt you. I can help you. I can give you anything.”

You shake your head slowly, taking an involuntary step back.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this. You don’t have to keep fighting me. You can trust me. Maybe we can see… where _else_ we can take this.”

Heat flares in your face again. You don’t like his inflection on that ‘where else’, or what he’s implying there. Even if you did fucking start it. You raise your fingers to your lips, bruised and kiss-swollen. And you laugh.

“No,” you say.

That… oh. That feels better than anything. Better than his kisses, better than cursing him or trying to hurt him. Just, no. _No_.

There’s a line, after all. There’s a fucking line, and you feel sick at how close you came to toeing it. How you were actually enjoying writhing beneath him, enjoying having him ravage your mouth, getting _turned on_ by it. The realisation, the sheer horror of it, is sobering. No. No, no, fucking _no_.

“No,” you repeat, almost yelling it now. You’re… probably a little delirious.

You can see him struggle to maintain his charming little smile, that open, inviting body language. Although his expression doesn’t change, you can feel the way his aura darkens, how the weight of the void tightens around you both, creaking angrily.

“You are _stubborn_ , aren’t you?”

The hairs on your arms stand on end. You can feel it crackling in the air, the pressure of the darkness closing in. You’re making him mad, and that’s a terrible idea. But then, what does it matter? You’d already accepted he was going to fuck you up one way or another.

You brace yourself, gritting your teeth as you smile at him. Maybe Dark is everything you deserve. You might hate yourself, for everything you are and aren’t and all the weakness in between, but you hate him _more_. And you have the power to deny him the one thing he wants most.

He can break you, hurt you, haunt you, control you, but he will never have your trust, and you will never stop fighting him.

“Yeah, I am stubborn. What the fuck are you gonna do about it?”

For a moment, you see his composure break. The way he fragments, distorts, his auras splitting and blurring. The sudden burst of high-pitched ringing in your ears, almost like a scream.

You clench your fists, tensing, trying desperately not to be intimidated. At least being slightly drunk still is good for straight-up stupid courage.

Directly taunting him was probably not the best idea you’ve ever had.

Dark snaps back into his form, breathing out heavily. He rolls his neck, slowly and deliberately. His eyes open, and he stares at you with that gaze that feels like it could pierce your very soul.

The corners of his lips quirk up, a sardonic little smile.

“Your spirit is admirable,” he says. And you’re not sure, but you think maybe he’s actually being halfway genuine and _complimenting_ you? “But you’re also drunk.”

He steps closer again and you can’t move, pinned by his eyes and presence. There’s something new in his gaze that you’ve never seen before. For a long time you can’t place it; it’s not something you’d ever even imagined seeing in him. And it’s grudging – oh, it’s grudging at best – but there’s a newfound respect and interest that he’s regarding you with.

“Go back to sleep. We will continue this conversation later. _Don’t_ think I will forget about this little… incident.”

He’s not giving you a choice in the matter. He turns away from you with a final smirk, a promise and a threat in one, and the void instantly closes around him. You try to reach out, but the darkness is suddenly as thick as tar. You can’t move through it, you can barely breathe.

With Dark gone, it finally hits you. You are _beyond_ lucky that he let you go this time, but there’s no way he’s going to be so lenient the next time you meet. Your head spins as you try to make sense of it; from how you even ended up here, those kisses you shared, how you apparently somehow manage to find a backbone and finally stand up to him. You’re still kind of proud about that, even though you’re certain that he will make you regret it later. The first part of your encounter… not so much. You hope you’re drunk enough to forget about _that,_ because otherwise you’re probably going to be reliving it in your dreams and that is the last thing you want.

God. You know what? You’re loathe to do anything that Dark says, but he might right on one thing. You should sleep. Now he’s gone, now it’s all catching up to you, you find yourself shaking. You’re emotionally exhausted. And you’re clearly no longer welcome here; the void is actively trying to drag you down, push you out.

You close your eyes and let it. It feels like suffocating, like you’re going to drown before it lets you go, but finally you manage to draw in a deep, shuddering breath.

You roll over and end up breaking into a grating coughing fit, as if you can force out the feel of the void choking you out of your lungs. With trembling hands, you reach out and flip over the phone on your nightstand, turning it on to illuminate your surroundings.

Yeah. This is your bed, your phone, your home.  It’s also 3am, and you feel like shit.

You cover your eyes with your arms, quietly half-crying, half-laughing to yourself. Fucking _Dark_.

At least this time, when you quickly fall into an exhausted, fitful sleep, you’re too tired to see him in your dreams any more.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** The violence is back up again in this one. Blood, gore, injury of the stabby variety as well as with vampire gloves (i.e. gloves with small metal shards hammered through them; think something close to a slightly larger and more spaced out cheese grater). Kidnapping, technically. And of course the usual completely fucked up, unhealthy, abusive relationship dynamic.

He’s turned you into a paranoid mess.

You know for a fact that the last time you met you royally pissed Dark off. And you _know_ he’s not just going to let the matter lie; he practically promised that much. You’ve only seen him that mad once before, and it ended up with your back torn to shreds and the third degree burns of a fresh brand on your shoulder.

So, yeah, you’re more than a little apprehensive.

It’s been weeks, though. Weeks, and still nothing. Somehow that’s _worse_.

You still hear his voice in the back of your mind, his static in your ears in the quiet moments when you try to block out the rest of the world. But that’s nothing new; you’ve been living with that ever since that first night. His actual presence, though, the feeling of him watching you, calling to you, controlling you? You haven’t felt that at all.

Not feeling his presence is almost as terrifying as when he _is_ there. You wish he would just get it over with. Because in the meantime, you’ve been afraid to fall asleep. You’re jumping at shadows, hyperaware of anyone just saying the word ‘dark’ in conversations. There’s deep, bruise-like circles beneath your eyes. Every day your resolve to stand against him, no matter the cost, wavers a little more.

Because you’re not strong enough for that. The opposite, honestly. You’re fucking weak, and you know it. It really is only sheer stubbornness that’s kept you fighting against him all this time. But _god_ , you’re tired.

You’re a paranoid mess, and the longer you go without his attention, the worse it gets.

If you had any idea how, you’d seek him out yourself. Maybe not the same way as last time, because that is… really not something you want to repeat. But even if you did find him, what would you do? Beg him to hurt you just to get it over with?

He’s probably doing this on purpose too, you think darkly. He likes watching you suffer and squirm.

Home is about the only place you feel halfway safe anymore. The one place you let your guard down. You should have figured he would ruin that for you as well.

You’re trying to focus on one of your university assignments when your lights flicker and your headphones burst with static, chills running like ice down your spine, and you freeze in place. Panic catches immediately in your throat – you _know_ that presence, but how can he be here? Why now?

No. No, it doesn’t mean he’s _here_ , right? He’s turned his attention to you, you can feel that much, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to appear or anything. There were times when you’d be left with shivers and ringing in your ears for days on end as he toyed with you from the void; it’s only the fact that he _hasn’t_ been messing with you that’s got you even more twitchy than usual.

Needless to say, the knock on your door nearly makes you jump out of your skin.

You laugh at yourself, maybe a little hysterically. Stupid. As if Dark would come and fucking _knock_ at the door to your room. It must be one of your housemates. You’re such a wreck.

You run your hand through your hair, trying to compose yourself a little more and ignore the way your hair is standing on end, before opening the door.

Dark is just fucking standing there, a goddamned smirk on his face, and you both stare at each other for a long moment. Your heart starts racing in an instant, breath catching, and you slam the door in his face.

You’re shaking as you turn around, leaning your weight against the door as though that would stop him getting through. Except he’s already in your room. Not like he needs to obey the laws of physics, after all.

“Get _out!”_ you demand. He can’t—no. Why the fuck would he be here? It’s surreal, _sickening_ , to see the monster who’s been haunting you for so long casually violating the one safe space you had left. It’s like he leeches all the colour from his surroundings, reality shifting and glitching around him, corrupting here as well.

He tilts his head at you, entirely unperturbed. “Gladly,” he says smoothly, but coldly. “I only came to collect you, after all. I have no intention to stay in… _this_ place.”

You might be slightly insulted about how derisive he’s being – it’s not much of a place, but it’s home to you – but you’re more concerned by the first part of his statement.

“What do you mean, ‘collect’?” you ask, voice hard.

“Come with me,” Dark says. Commands.

You can feel it starting already; the pressure tightening around your chest, the crawling beneath your skin like a thousand invisible hands clawing at you. Bile starts to rise in your throat; you hoped you’d never have to feel this way again, the powerlessness and sheer horror as Dark physically wrenches all control away from you, the way he can just use you like a goddamned puppet.

“ _Okay!_ Okay. You don’t have to force me.” You don’t add ‘fucking asshole’ to the end of your sentence, but you hope your vitriolic glare expresses the sentiment well enough.

The sensation lessens, and you take in a shuddering breath.

You don’t want to push his patience. Your fingers are already trembling as you grab a coat to throw on and do up your shoes.

You’ve been playing this moment over and over and over in your head for weeks. The moment you’d finally get your comeuppance. You’ve had enough experience by now to know it’s going to be _hell_ , and it makes you feel sick to your stomach.

Dark puts his hand on the back of your neck, and the contact makes you blanche. His touch feels cold as ice, a quiet, controlled fury in the grip of his fingers. He didn’t seem that mad outwardly, but the second he touches you, you can tell.

He uses his grip to guide you. You don’t know where you’re going, or why he actually had to physically come and get you this time – come and ‘collect’ you. It makes it sound like he’s a grim reaper, and the time has come for your soul to be claimed.

Funnily enough, that’s not a reassuring thought.

You don’t look at him. You can tell that he’s dampened his presence; he’s putting on a human glamour while you’re out in public and could be seen. You don’t want to see it. He can pretend so well; almost flawlessly. You don’t want to look at him and see Mark’s face instead. You don’t want him to talk to you in Mark’s voice. Because that… that just feels like blasphemy to you. Dark is a _monster_ , and it’s cruel, vile irony that he masquerades as someone who does so much good and so much that makes people’s lives better.

They always say the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.

The silence between you is absolutely thunderous, suffocating, so thick you feel like you’re going to choke on it. It feels like you’re walking towards your execution. For all you know, you _are_ , though Dark has always seemed more interested in simply breaking you than killing you before.

Eventually, you can’t take it anymore.

“Where are we going?” you ask. Your throat feels tight, and you struggle to get the words out.

“Oh? Have you decided you want to talk now?” His voice is low, but quietly acerbic. “Tired of being ignored?”

You’re just tired of this, full stop. “I would have happily had you ignore me for the rest of my life if I knew you weren’t coming back,” you snap. You’re so _tired_. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?! What more do you even _want_ from me? If you wanted my attention you fucking have it, I can’t go a goddamn day without thinking about how much you’ve messed me up!”

Your hands are shaking, and you clench them into fists.

He reaches out and runs his fingertips across your cheek, an oddly tender gesture until his hand sinks into your hair and _pulls_ , his grip tight enough to make tears spring to your eyes.

“Your insolence and defiance is irritating, yet intriguing. Let’s simply say you caught my interest.”

You close your eyes just so you don’t have to look at him, turning your face away. Yeah. You get it. You were just a toy, something to be used and then tossed aside. That’s how he sees people. Only when you pushed back too hard, you became a _challenge_ instead. And that is an infinitely more dangerous thing to be.

He leans in. He’s shed his glamour like a second skin – you’re far away from public view now, at the edge of town where forest and abandoned houses meet – and when he next talks it’s with the full power of his voice, low and distorted and multi-layered.

“And now we’re going to be together, forever.”

He says it like a seductive promise and the most terrible threat all in one, and your blood runs cold.

You try to shove him away but he’s still got hold of your hair, and now he grips your throat as well. “As for why we’re here, consider it an act of generosity. This will be easier for you in a location where the boundary between dimensions is weaker.”

The boundary between dimensions; it clicks into place immediately. He’s going to drag you back into the void, into his domain. But—no. You’ve ended up there before, and he didn’t need to seek you out like this. Because then it was only your conscience that had slipped into the cracks between reality. This time…

You shout wordlessly, struggling, but already you can already feel it taking hold. His expression is blank, icy concentration, and his touch—it’s always been cold, you’ve always felt like it could drain all the warmth and life from you if he held on too long. Well, now that’s exactly what he’s doing.

It steals your breath and your heartbeat. It’s frostbite eating through your veins like acid, and you can’t even move or scream anymore. It turns you to stone and then shatters you into pieces.

He’s dragging you back into the void, physical body and all. And it feels like _dying_ because it’s only a fraction away from exactly that.

Your awareness returns slowly, clawing its way back into a fractured shell. You’re lying on the floor –  if you can even call it a floor when existence extends in endless black in every direction – with Dark standing above you. It hurts. Everything fucking hurts, your entire body aching like… well, like it’s just been torn apart and ripped through dimensions, which is really not something human bodies are designed for.

You choke back a bitter laugh, the sound dying in your throat as you see your own hands. Palid and washed out, with veins that stand out too much against the surface like cracks in shattered vase. It’s—it’s not as bad as Dark, not the same kind of monochrome grey as his ashen skin, but at the same time, it doesn’t really look very… alive.

Oh, _god_.

“What the hell have you done?!” you yell at him in abject horror.

“I told you,” he says smoothly, coldly. He’s wearing that cruel smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “We’re going to be together forever.”

“No. _No_. Fuck. Let me _out_ , Dark!”

His lips quirk; you can’t tell if it’s irritation or derisive amusement. Maybe both. It’s clear he has no intention of letting you go, and zero remorse for bringing you here. Of course not. You’re pretty sure he’s incapable of remorse.

“I have a _life_ , you can’t just keep me here!”

“Really,” he says, in that tone that sounds so casually detached and disinterested. Yet the undertone of mocking is practically palpable.

“My family—”

“How long do you think it will take for them to notice you’re gone?” he interrupts, and you fall abruptly silent. “When was the last time you spoke to them?”

Is he just guessing, or does he _know_ somehow? You get along fine with your family, but… he’s right. You’re busy, you’re not so close to them that you feel the need to talk that often, and in the past you’ve had an entire semester go by without a word exchanged before you realise it.

“I have _friends_.”

“Online. People come and go constantly in such communities.”

“My university…”

“Will assume you’re another dropout. Hardly uncommon.”

You have nothing left to protest. Instead, you slowly force yourself to your feet. Every muscle aches and you sway as you stand, balance shot to pieces. Your body knows it’s not meant to exist here, and it’s fighting every move you make. But you stand and stare Dark down anyway.

“Take me back home,” you demand.

Your voice comes out as shaky as you feel. You’re struggling to hold it together; being dragged into the void, _trapped_ , and then having Dark so brutally and efficiently dismiss your entire life like it means nothing. It cuts to the core, because you know there’s a seed of truth to his words. No one would even miss you, not until it’s far too late.

He’s heartless. Completely and utterly heartless. You hate letting him get to you; you refuse to let him see that he has.

Dark says nothing, just watching you, waiting for you to accept your fate, and it’s _infuriating_.

Your fists clench, and you finally break. “Take me _back!!_ ” you scream at him.

Screaming is a bad idea. His patience was already running thin, and you can tell by the way his eyes narrow in rage that you’ve pushed too far.

The pressure, the intensity of the blackness surrounding you tightens like a physical entity until you can barely breathe, Dark’s presence crackling with anger. His twin auras flare, breaking and distorting and warping around him. The void seems to creak with the weight of it, the ringing in your ears growing deafening.

“You’re never going to escape,” he snaps, the closest to shouting you’ve ever seen him. “ _I_ am in control here, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop me!”

You shrink back, heart in your throat. He’s intimidating at the best of times, but like this he’s downright terrifying.

He takes a moment to regain his composure, slowly cracking his neck. Then he slides his jacket from his shoulders, loosening his tie and rolling the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. Under other circumstances, it might have made an extremely sensual picture, but all you can think now is… this is it, this your eternal suffering.

You take a step backwards, slowly at first, shakily, but then gaining momentum. All you want is to instinctively put as much distance between Dark and yourself as possible, even if you know nothing will come of it.

Dark makes a gesture, barely a curl of his fingers, and all of a sudden you find yourself backing against a solid wall of his creation. Nowhere left to run.

He looks at you with cold fury in his eyes, expression only a fraction away from a sneer. “Take off your coat and trousers,” he says.

You can’t help it. You balk, stomach lurching sickeningly, and you can’t help but blurt out, “ex _cuse_ you?!”

“Do it yourself, or I’ll do it for you,” he says impatiently. “Which would you prefer?”

You hesitate, but don’t dare disobey. You stare down at the ground, fingers trembling as you unbutton your coat. It only gets worse as you undo your shoes and slide them off. Sock too. You don’t want to keep him waiting, not when he’s already lost his patience once, but god, you really don’t want to do this.

It’s just like with the whip, when he tore your shirt to expose your back. It’s for the purposes of whatever punishment he has planned, and nothing more than that. Doesn’t make you feel much better about having to strip down to just your underwear and a t-shirt in front of him, though. Your breathing is ragged and pulse rapid with fear as you remove your jeans. You feel sickeningly vulnerable like this.

You can’t bear to look at him, but you try to glance out of the corner of your eye enough to see what he’s doing. See what’s coming, how he’s going to destroy you this time. You choke back a broken, bitter laugh at the realisation this is starting to become normal for you.

Gloves. That’s what he has; black leather gloves that he pulls on with clear intent. There’s a metallic glint to the palm.

At first you don’t understand, until he grasps your jaw and pulls your head up to look at him, and you gasp in shock. Spikes. There’s fucking metal spikes, metal shards, embedded all across the palm and fingers of the gloves, and they’re biting viciously into your skin where he’s holding you. He’s not even gripping that hard, yet you already can feel the shards threatening to pierce the flesh and leave you bleeding.

“Dark, please…” you plead quietly. You know there’s no point. He’s not going to stop, no matter how much you beg, you know that. But at the same time, you can’t just let him hurt you, not without at least a goddamn protest.

His tightens his hold, and you wince. You have to bite your lip to prevent yourself making any sound; the spikes are fucking _sharp_ , and you know that holding you with them only digging in is the _least_ painful thing he’s going to do with those fucked up gloves.

“Brace your forearms against the wall,” he orders you.

You turn around and do so. You rest your forehead against the wall as well, eyes clenched shut and teeth grit. You’re just going to have to get through this, brave it out; there’s no other options left for you.

The very first strike makes you scream.

He hits you, _hard_ , the force of it driving the spikes all the way through your skin. And then, with spikes embedded, he drags his hand across your thigh, tearing blood-red ribbons into your flesh.

The pain of it leaves you reeling, choking back a quiet sob. The gashes burn, stinging violently and spewing blood thickly down the back of your leg.

The second time is no better.

Your thighs get the worst of it by far, all vivid purple bruises marred with bloody lines, but it’s everywhere. He doesn’t hit your arms or back to the same degree; no, those he just digs the spikes into and tears across your skin. From your shoulders and down your arms, tearing the fabric of your t-shirt so the cotton ends up a sodden mess with your blood congealing it into the open gashes.

He reaches around, far too close to you. The hairs on the back of your neck stand on end; you can feel his presence, barely inches away from being pressed against your back. He squeezes your throat with one hand while the other tears bloody rips across your hip and you whimper.

You’re shaking, unwitting tears staining your face. You’ve given up on screaming; your voice is soon too hoarse for that, and all that you can manage are pained, broken moans.

You can’t take much more. Your legs are trembling, threatening to give out at any moment. If you don’t faint first, because you feel beyond lightheaded and your vision is fading out at the edges already.

“Dark...” you choke out, trying to warn him. You’re going to collapse any second, you fucking _can’t_ —

Another powerful strike against the back of your thigh, and your knees buckle. You plunge to the ground, and only Dark’s arm quickly wrapped around your waist stops you falling completely.

You twist around in his grip; you end up with your fingers clutching at his shoulders, clinging to him.  Normally you wouldn’t be able to stand being so close – there’s something unsettling, something repulsive about letting a monster like Dark hold you against him – but right now, he’s the only thing keeping you halfway upright.

You’re getting bloodstains on his shirt, and he doesn’t look overly impressed at that fact.

“Stand up,” he demands. He shoves you back against the wall; at least now you can lean your weight against that instead, although your trembling knees are still threatening to give way at any moment. Even despite your best efforts, gravity drags you down.

Dark takes off the gloves, and for a moment you actually feel some kind of relief. For a moment you almost believed that meant it was over. But then he pulls a knife from the darkness instead; the body of it is thin, more spike than blade, but long and cruel regardless. He takes you by the throat and pulls you upright again, pinned against the wall, and pierces the dagger through your right shoulder. All the way through and out the other side.

You can’t even make a sound. The shock of it is too great, the dizzying pain too great to even process.

He knows what he’s doing; he hasn’t hit any major arteries or nerves or bones, and he has the angle of it exactly right to allow the blade to go through only muscle and pierce into the wall behind you. He knows how to cause the most pain without killing you. Not immediately, at least.

It feels like hell.

“Why…” you try to gasp, breath catching on a ragged sob. “I don’t _understand._ I obeyed you, I took your damn punishment, what more do you _want_ from me?!”

He’s too close again. One hand is holding the knife, while the other threads through your hair and uses it to pull your head back. You don’t want to look at him, but your faces are mere inches away and he’s not giving you a damn choice. His smile is tight, controlled, sadistic. He’s enjoying your pain.

“Obedience is not the same as submission,” he says. Slowly, like he’s explaining the concept to a simpleton. “You follow my orders only because you believe you have no other choice, not because you want to. You let me in, only to turn around and try to push me away again the moment you think I’m not paying attention.”

With each word, he grows more agitated. He twists the knife to punctuate his sentence as he finishes, and agony sears white-hot through your shoulder. You cry out, shaking violently. So close to falling, but you can’t move without making the pain even more insufferable.

“No more. Never again.”

“P-please, just _stop it!_ ” you beg.

“All you have to do is let me in. It’s as simple as that.”

You clench your eyes shut. “I… I _can’t_.”

Because you can’t surrender, not willingly, unless you trust him. And there is no one who deserves your trust less. Every instinct screams at you to stay away from him, even as he tries to draw you in, and your mind replays just how much he’s hurt you every time he touches you.

You’ve been through this game before. Even if you let him in now, it never lasts. You’ll always be fighting against the shackles he’s placed on you.

Dark breathes out heavily, almost a hiss. But he keeps his composure. “I’ve been waiting _patiently_ to finally have you to myself. I suppose I can wait just a little longer.”

He yanks the knife back, and you immediately slump to the floor with a moan. You frantically press your hand to the wound, trying to stem the bleeding, only… only to find it’s not bleeding as heavily as you’d expect, just the same sluggish ooze as the gashes on the rest of your body.

“Don’t worry,” Dark assures you. “You won’t be able to die in here; not unless I allow it.”

No, because death would be too easy a way out.

“You have all eternity to change your mind.”

He turns his back on you, and you realise then that he intends to just _leave_ you here like this. In the midst of the void with no way out, and you remember how well that went for you last time. If you stay here too long… you don’t think you’ll make it out with your sanity intact.

On your hands and knees you try to reach out for him, fingertips grasping at nothing. He’s already too far away. “Dark!” you call. Fear quakes in your voice.

He spares a cold look back for you, and the slightest tilt of his head. It’s not for your reassurance, no; he’s created something else out of the void, a manacle tight around your ankle, chained to the floor. It feels like metal, but it’s made of the same pure black as the rest of the world here.

As if you needed to be bound in place. It’s not like you had the strength to try and follow him anyway, and the feel of it against your skin just makes the despair eat at you even more viciously.

All you can do is watch the colours of his aura waver and fade.

“Dark, please. Dark?! _Dark!!_ ” you scream, but his name only echoes hollowly in the complete and utter emptiness of the void around you. He’s gone, and you’re trapped alone in the darkness.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little slow to start, since it's more focused on scene-setting, but I swear Dark does turn up eventually lol. There's even hints of plot! (Though I'm not sure where I'm going with that, I'm making this up as I go along. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯)

Time doesn’t have any meaning at all in the void. A day could be an entire age, or a century feel like mere moments. Usually the former, because it would be too much to hope for any kind of suffering to be over quickly.

Passing out was probably the only thing that saved what little sanity you have left. Because your consciousness didn’t hang around long after your last encounter with Dark – after he left bloodied and bruised and with a goddamn stab wound through your shoulder. Once he was gone, you couldn’t hang on for long.

Given that the first time you were in the void it took barely ten minutes to twist your thoughts into dark, violent places, passing out was probably the best thing you could have done.

And when you woke up, your injuries were healed into little more than fresh pink scars, and you were… here.

It’s a construct, of some kind. You can only assume Dark provided it for you, though you doubt it’s out of any selfless intent. He can manipulate to void, the darkness, to make you see anything, to make it _be_ anything. So he made you your room. An empty, washed out replica – and you _know_ he could have made it flawlessly if he chose, so the fact it’s so devoid of any colour or any of your possessions is a blatant reminder of your place as a prisoner here.

There’s nothing inside the wardrobe or drawers, no clothes except the ones that came into the void with you. None of your books or games, no laptop. The TV is still there, but when you turn it on it only ever displays static. The sound of it is more unsettling than the silence; if you listen to it for too long, you begin to hear distorted, murmuring voices amongst the white noise and crackling hisses.

But the most obvious differences are the two that disturb you most. Firstly, the view beyond the window. Or, more accurately the lack thereof. Because all there is outside is the endless dark of the void, as if you were staring into the eye of a black hole every time you try to glance over.

You keep the curtains closed.

The second difference is the fact that the door is missing. Just… gone, a solid wall in its place as if it had never existed. The windows don’t open any more either. There’s no way out.

The construct – your fucking prison cell, basically – at least offers some protection from the clawing torment of the darkness outside. Instead of driving you into a rapid and destructive madness, you get to wallow in an aching, mindless emptiness that’s almost as unbearable. But you don’t even have the strength or motivation to try to end it.

You’re like a ghost, haunting this place. You can’t think, can’t feel, can’t breathe. Literally, in the case of the latter; you did try smothering yourself once, but it didn’t do anything.

You don’t need to eat or drink either. You don’t need to sleep – can’t. God, you wish you could. At least that would be some respite. But the best you can manage is lying in your bed, halfway towards dozing as you stare at the ceiling. You spend hours on end pacing the room – there’s not even enough room to pace, really, but you have nothing, _nothing_ , else to do other than let despair devour you. It’s the sort of empty nothingness where you lowkey constantly want to kill yourself, but don’t have the motivation or courage to even do that much.

It might have been days. Weeks. Months. You can’t tell.

The only thing you know is that you need to get _out_.

Thoughts come slowly, distantly, when they come at all. There are times when you stir enough to recognise just how trapped you are, how much you’re losing yourself, and those are the times you fucking scream until your voice is wrecked, slamming your fists into the walls as if you could ever possibly break your way out. You drag your nails across your arms until they finally bleed, and you go to write your name on the wall in your own blood just so you don’t forget it, only to discover it’s too damn late and it’s already gone.

You cry until the hollowness takes over again. Hollowness and hate. A low, simmering resentment for the one who put you here. Goddamn _Dark_.

Any life you used to have is long gone. You’ve accepted that and mourned it, as much as you can when you’re trapped in this hellhole. Because even if you ever get out of here, things won’t ever be the same.

But Dark… Dark is still out there. You don’t know what the hell you could possibly do, but all you want is to _hurt him back_. You’re not stupid enough to imagine a pathetic little human like you could ever take him down, or even truly hurt him, but goddamn, if you could just do _something_ to wound his pride you’d consider it a victory. Maybe then you could die with some kind of dignity, instead of wasting away into a broken, snivelling shadow of yourself.

Doing anything like that would first require getting out. And you can’t get out unless you could—

Unless you could work out how to manipulate the void the same way Dark does.

Because it’s not just him, is it? Wilford has at least some similar sort of reality-bending abilities. Anyone who’s spent too much time in or around the cracks between worlds starts to become influenced, even if they don’t realise or can’t control it.

What if you _could_ control it? You’re definitely in the category of having spent way too much time here now. There must be something, _anything_ …

It takes a long time. Because half of your existence just wants to fade out, and you waste hours, days at a time walking around on empty, staring at nothing and listening only to the ringing in your ears. But it’s there now, a thought planted deep enough that it keeps resurfacing in the moments of almost lucidity between. The need – no, the actual _want_ , the motivation – to free yourself.

There’s no fanfare when it happens. You don’t think it was even you, not consciously. It feels like days, maybe weeks since the thought even occurred to you; that might be an accurate assumption of your time here, or maybe you’re wildly off. You’ll probably never know. And you’d almost forgotten the thought entirely in that time.

You’re aware enough in that moment that it feels like it’s killing you; aware enough to know exactly how trapped you are, and it makes your throat and chest tighten. You’re going fucking stir-crazy in here. You want to kick down the walls and shatter the glass, you want to _run_ , but there’s nowhere to go. Even the empty void beyond the window seems a preferable option.

You pick up the TV and throw it at the glass, but they both bounce off each other like they were made of stone. It’s _infuriating_.

“Let me out!” you scream at nothing. “Let me out letmeout _letmeout_.”

You let the rage and despair overtake you and wear you down – it’s a horrible feeling, and leaves you shaky and exhausted every time, but goddamnit, at least you’re able to feel anything at all. And when you’re done, you rest your forehead against the glass and try to breathe, evening out your gasping, ragged breaths, to bring yourself back down.

Your ears ring in the sudden silence after your outburst, stars meandering slowly behind your closed eyes. And when you open them again, you’re on the other side of the window.

Your stomach lurches sickeningly.

This… oh. You have to take a moment to reorient yourself, disbelief numbing you. This was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You’re free. As much as you can be. But now you’ve got the entire expanse of the void ahead of you, and it’s like stepping out into a vicious, biting gale with the way you feel it already starting to claw at the tattered edges of your mind.

You take a breath and steel yourself as much as you’re able, a new hardness entering your blank eyes. This is the only chance you’re going to get. And if it kills you, good. Probably.

Already the hollow echo of your room is fading, the construct cracking and crumbling behind you. You cry out in alarm – fuck, what if that was your only point of reference, your only refuge in this entire damn place? – but it’s too late. Dark may have been the one to set up the construct, but without you there to feed it and maintain it from your memories, the whole thing fell apart and dissolved back into the nothingness like it had never existed.

At least… you had always assumed Dark must have been the one to put you there. But the way it just fell apart like that left you feeling uneasy; as though it had only existed as long as you’d needed it, and like maybe you’d had a bigger role in its existence than you wanted to acknowledge.

There was no way you could have created something like that yourself. Was there? No matter how badly you’d needed something, _anything_ , to protect you from the dark. It hadn’t achieved anything more than trapping you inside your own head, listless and empty, although it wasn’t like it would be the first time you’d worked yourself into such a state. And wasn’t it odd that, in all the time you’d been in there, Dark had never come for you?

There’s nothing to be gained in worrying about it now, and no way to turn back. You turn to face the void, and you _run_.

If there’s one thing you hold on to, one thing you have to believe just to keep yourself going, is that there are more things out there. More buildings, more constructs, more cracks and gaps in reality that maybe you could find your way through. It’s a shallow fucking hope, but it’s all you have.

In some weird way, you feel like you’ve gotten used to the void; as if your eyes had adjusted to the darkness. It’s not actually a visual change – no, the blackness is as complete and overwhelming as always – but something about it feels different. The energy of it, as if some areas of the void are a higher frequency, or more saturated, or… or something. You don’t understand it yourself. All you can say is that it feels somehow more _open_ when you look in certain directions.

So that’s the direction you take.

Keep moving and don’t think. The second you allow any thoughts in, you know they’ll be twisted around and turned against you. You’ve got a purpose now, something to focus on. Not a _good_ purpose, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s better than letting the festering self-hatred boiling beneath the surface of your mind back in.

Hurt Dark. That’s all you want, just one small victory. You don’t even know how to begin going about it.

That’s the thought your mind latches onto. Or the void latches onto, it’s hard to tell. You keep running – jogging, slowing to a walk to recover, then picking up speed again, because you’ve learned from last time to pace yourself better – and the longer you keep at it, the more violent the ideations get.

You laugh bitterly. What could you do to him? You’re not sure Dark can even die, but wouldn’t it be _fun_ to try? Maybe pull an Anti, take a knife and slice through Dark’s throat. Stab straight through his heart, carve out his eyes, cut his tongue out of his pretty face so he can never tell his lovely little lies again. Or keep it simple; take a gun and shove the barrel into his mouth and blow his brains out.

You stop abruptly, swaying on your feet while nausea washes through you.

Your own thoughts sicken you. No. They’re not your thoughts; that’s not you. That’s _not_. You hate him, and honestly, yeah, it would be for the greater good if someone did take the damned monster out, but revelling in the violence and brutality like that…?

 _No_. It’s this place again, fucking with your head. But the thoughts still leave you feeling uneasy.

You’re not a monster like Dark.

There’s something ahead, a shard of grey amongst the inky blackness. You try not to get your hopes up – you’ve been here before, fallen for this trick and had your hopes decimated by it – but you find your pace increasing anyway.

You try not to get your hopes up, but the closer you get, the clearer it becomes. It’s no fragment of a mirror this time. No, there’s an entire building there, sprawling and expansive.

Not that it’s _meant_ to be there; the whole thing looks fragmented, shadowy and only half real, lurching at a bizarre angle like a ship snapped in half and slowing sinking into the endless depths. It’s jutting into the void, straddling dimensions, and the strain of it causes the entire place to creak and groan alarmingly.

Just looking at it you can tell the whole thing is _wrong_.

But it’s also all you’ve got. Is this one of those places like Dark mentioned, where the boundary between dimensions is weaker? Weak enough to have an entire damn manor bleeding through.

And maybe weak enough for you to get out.

Every instinct screams at you to turn and run in the other direction, but you push through it and approach the manor anyway. The door opens easily to let you in.

It _looks_ normal. Or, as normal as anything can in a place like this. Aside from the colour having bled out of everything, replaced by a wavering greyscale, it looks like a normal household. Fancy, maybe, but normal. There’s certainly nothing that would seem to warrant the way your hair stands on end, or the way ice settles in the pit of your stomach.

The place is all marble floors, antique-looking tables and vases, a recliner to one side of the entranceway and a sweeping staircase to the other, windows of stained glass failing to filter in any light at all. The only thing out of place is the frame against the wall directly ahead of the door; it was clearly meant to be the centrepiece of the room, but there was nothing there anymore. Not just not there, but within the empty frame was instead a gaping black maw, like the room’s own personal black hole. Whatever it was emanated an aura of pure malice.

You gave that a wide berth and moved the explore the room beyond.

Not the best decision you’ve ever made – it takes you a moment to blink and recognise what you’re looking at, but once it clicks you find yourself screaming. You catch yourself and clamp your hands over your mouth, heart pounding with the surprise and sickening horror.

There’s corpses in the room. A _lot_ of them. Just fucking piled on the furniture and spilled onto the floor and pushed into heaps against the wall. There’s got to be… god, at least forty of them, mostly intact but beginning to show varying degrees of decomposition and—

You step back shakily, swallowing hard. They’re all the same. The corpses. They’re bodies of the _same person_ , and they look…familiar. Too familiar. You try not to look too hard at the faces.

It’s a long shot, but what you really need is something to defend yourself with. A weapon. Maybe there’s one in here, whatever was used to… to murder the people – person? – whose corpses are now fucking everywhere. A lot seem to have stab wounds. One at the forefront, splayed in a central position on the floor, has a gunshot wound and the resultant, distinctive splatter around him. Either a knife or gun would be good for you.

You keep one hand covering your mouth and your eyes down. It feels like desecration, like a goddamn sacrilege, to just be rooting around looking for a murder weapon while surrounded by corpses. Your breathing grows shaky, disgust churning in your gut. Are you really this damn desperate?

Yeah. Apparently you are.

You don’t find anything, and only grow more frantic. There has to be something, god, _anything_ that’s going to help you. If not here then somewhere, somewhere in fucked up house. Either a weapon or a way out, you’ll take whichever you can get.

You’re so caught up in the frenzy of your own thoughts, your own desperation and the terrifying underlying feeling of malice that permeates the whole place, that you don’t even notice that you’re not alone.

Until you turn around and run straight into Dark.

You yell in shock and try to scrabble away, but it’s not like that’s going to do you any good. He follows straight after you until you just end up backing yourself up against a wall.

“Dark,” you gasp, heart racing a mile a minute. Oh, god. You’re so screwed.

His expression is absolutely unreadable, and that terrifies you. If he’s furious, he’s not showing it. And he’s got to be furious, right? You’re clearly somewhere you’re not meant to be. You were looking for a goddamn weapon to attack him with – though hopefully he doesn’t have enough insight into your thoughts to actually know that.

He’s just _staring_ at you, and his gaze binds you as effectively as any chains.

You swallow, hard. The tension, the fear of the unknown, is utterly unbearable. “What do you _want?_ ”

He tilts his head, observing you with clinical disinterest. Only the violent distortions of his aura flickering around him betray his agitation.

“I will admit,” he finally says, “I am impressed.” His tone is smooth, not icy but still too emotionless for your liking. Like he can’t decide whether to applaud your audacity or murder you for your impudence. Or both. Both is still an option, so you’re not at all reassured just yet. “But you shouldn’t be in here.”

“Yeah, I’d kind of gathered that one for myself, thanks,” you reply. Fear sharpens your words with a sarcastic edge.

He reaches out and grips your arm. His touch his firm, but not violent; it makes you recoil regardless. “Follow me,” he commands. As if he was going to give you a choice.

You cast one helpless look around, as if a weapon is miraculously going to appear for you – funnily enough, nothing does, but you could have sworn you saw the corpses staring at you with black, dead eyes as Dark leads you away. For once, you don’t fight him as much as you could have.

He leads you a different path, through the manor and out onto some kind of expansive patio.

You blink. You could almost cry just looking at it, because it… it looks _real_. Like you’ve stepped through the manor and out the other side, into the reality that it exists in. There’s sprawling grounds beyond the patio railing, trees and clearings and meandering paths, and an actual sky, bright blue and littered with clouds. And sunlight. Oh, god, _sunlight_.

He’s actually brought you _out_ , except… you’re not out. You reach forward, trembling fingers trying to touch the patio railings, only to phase right through them.

It’s not real.

No, that’s not it. This might be real, but _you’re_ not. Even though you’re standing in full sunlight, you don’t cast a shadow.

You want to scream. It hurts worse than if Dark had just dragged you back into the nothingness of the void. But isn’t that just like him to torture you with the promise of what you want most – your freedom, you just be able to _exist_ – only to have it just out of your reach?

Your eyes grow cold again as you turn to look at Dark, simmering resentment. You really wish you’d had a chance to pick up some kind of weapon in there.

Dark only gives a low chuckle at your expression, and you snatch your arm back out of his grip. Condescending fucking bastard.

That turns out to be another bad idea, to add to the multitudes you’ve already made today. Because Dark was the only thing grounding you in a world you no longer exist in; without him holding you steady the sunlight burns right through you, the colours and sounds and the vibrancy of reality tearing right through the faded ghost of your current existence. You can feel it washing you away in an instant, and you shriek as you dive forward and latch back onto Dark.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss my assistance,” Dark says, voice dripping with dry black humour.

“I wouldn’t _need_ your assistance if you hadn’t brought me here,” you hiss. You’re clinging to his wrist and it makes your skin crawl to touch him, but the prospect of being burned from existence entirely is even worse.

“You are the one who came to this place. And believe me, there were far worse fates awaiting you had you continued to wander the manor so carelessly.”

“Ugh. Don’t try to make it sound like you’re here to help me!”

Dark huffs a short laugh. “The manor does not just let anyone in.” He regards you with a look you don’t like at all; calculating, impressed, maybe a touch amused. “Perhaps you belong in this place more than I initially considered. We are not so different.”

“I—fuck, I don’t belong here at all, I was only ever in the void because you dragged me here as some kind of messed up punishment! And I’m _nothing_ like you!”

He doesn’t say anything, just watches you with those cold, dark eyes until doubt begins to creep in. You _were_ kind of lowkey planning to murder him if you ever go the chance, after all. But that was only self-defence, right? For the good of every person he’s fucked over or would in the future. And it’s not like it ever would have worked anyway.

You’re not a monster. You’re not like him. You’re just…

“Sit down,” he says smoothly. Again, it’s not like you have a choice. Since you can’t let go of him, you have to follow him to a small glass patio table that sits overlooking the view, the two of you taking your seats on either side of it. He drops his hand, maintaining your contact by resting his fingers on your knee instead. You shudder and look away.

“What?” you demand of him, not bothering to mince words. You’re still on edge, certain he’s going to turn around do something horrific at any moment. He seems to enjoy hurting you, after all, and you’ve certainly earned it this time.

“You’ve become so abrasive,” he notes, and you bristle.

“Yeah, repeatedly torturing people kinda turns them against you, if you hadn’t noticed.”

And he has the gall to laugh. “As if you didn’t deserve it.”

“Deserve it?!” you rise to stand, but Dark tightens his grip on your knee warningly. You seethe for a moment, but sit back down. “What the everloving fuck did I ever do to deserve any of this?”

You started out angry at first, but it’s slowly draining back into pure grief. What the hell _did_ you do to deserve this?

“No worse than so many other humans,” Dark says. “Your kind are infuriating to watch, do you realise? So much potential, and so much of it _wasted_. Destroying you is a mercy.”

“Merciful is the _last_ thing you’ve ever been.”

“Tell me, then. Tell me you haven’t spent your entire life directionless, just _begging_ for someone to come and take control and give you a purpose.”

“Shut up!” you yell. “That’s not true at all.”

He merely tilts his head in acquiesce. He doesn’t need you to agree, not right now. His words have a way of worming into your mind, planting doubts and leaving you with uneasy ruminations in the quiet, dark moments when you’re lying awake in the dead of night, and he knows it.

“But perhaps you have a use after all. After all, you’ve managed to survive in my domain for an admirable length of time – considering how long it took to break you the first time, that’s a remarkable improvement. And you found your way here.”

You’re sick of listening him speak already. You don’t care. You don’t fucking _care_. Whatever the hell he wants from you, however he’s going to try and twist you round with pretty words and honeyed lies.

“All I want is to get back to my reality, in my own physical body, and get back to living as if none of this ever happened, and never have to think about your smug-ass face ever again. If you’re not going to help me – which you’re _not_ – you can shut the fuck up.”

He brushes the hair away from his eyes and smiles at you, oddly charming. Disarming. “If you recall, I am able to take you any place you want to go. Perhaps we could come to an agreement.”

“’I can take you wherever you’d like to go’,” you parrot. Like you haven’t replayed his words over and over a million times in your head, hearing the echo of them haunting your nightmares. “’Especially to the places you _don’t_ want to go.’ Yeah, I get it. I think we’ve covered the latter option pretty damn thoroughly.”

Since when has he given a shit about making an agreement with you anyway?

Actually – that is quite a pertinent question. All he’s ever done is hurt you, torment you. He’s never shown interest in anything other than breaking you. What’s different this time?

“And, if there was some kind of theoretical agreement that we had, what the hell could I even offer you in return?”

Dark smiles, his aura growing stronger and leaching the colour from the area around him, warping and distorting the fragile foothold of reality you’ve found yourself in. “Potential,” he says.

He reaches out with his other hand, touching the back of yours where it rests on the table. You try to jerk away, but his fingers tighten around your wrist. Trapping you.

You almost preferred it when he was straight up torturing you. That made sense, at least. He hurt you for his own sick amusement until you broke, and then he left you in shattered pieces. If he actually wants something from you, he could be infinitely more dangerous.

“Potential,” you repeat, disbelief souring your tone.

“There are endless possibilities,” Dark says. “When you have access to the very fabric of reality, the ability to pull the strings from behind the scenes.”

His voice is… alluring. You don’t want to listen to him, but he’s turned it up to full now, that way he speaks that sounds oh so reasonable, so appealing.

“You’ve already worked it out, haven’t you? Such crude attempts, but we all start somewhere.”

“I didn’t do anything,” you immediately deny.

“You survived, and you successfully shielded yourself from me. Now, that is something that can’t be allowed to continue, of course, but it demonstrates the ability is there. As I say, we are not so different.”

You stand up abruptly, your chair tipping and slamming to the floor, your hands clenched into fists on the table as you lean over it.

“I am _not_ like you!”

“Oh, of course not. You could never hope to wield even a fraction of the power I command. But I can sense the darkness taking root in you.”

“Shut up. Just _shut up!_ ”

He stands as well, using his grip around your wrist to pull you towards him. You end up practically stumbling into him, your forearm braced against his chest the only thing stopping you from ending up pressed body to body against him. His other arm slides around your waist and you tense, trying to pull away but with nowhere to go.

The embrace is… horrible, you hate it, you hate him, but god. After so long trapped in the void, so long _alone_ , any human contact at all feels good.

“We could do such great things together,” he murmurs, voice low and seductive.

You hate that he can talk like that and still make you feel things, despite everything. “I think I preferred it when you were just trying to break me,” you say bitterly.

“I can arrange for both, if you enjoy being hurt that much.”

“That’s not what I meant!!” You try to shove him away, but he has no intention of letting you go. Eventually, you stop struggling – squirming in his arms in only amusing him, and making his strength all the more obvious. You’re not even shifting him.

You settle into stillness, but refuse to look up to meet his eyes. You stare straight ahead at his tie instead. You don’t have a choice, do you? You have to do as he says, he’ll make sure of that. He always has. No matter how much you struggle and try to resist him, you’ll always end up playing right into his hands, over and over again. This is his game, and he always wins.

It’s… shit. You can’t believe you’re even considering it. But if he’s going to use you either way, you might as well try to get something out of it. Right? Although you’re not so stupid to think it’d be as easy as that. Dark doesn’t make deals; he makes you _think_ you have a deal, while never tying himself into promising you anything. He _could_ take you anywhere you want to go; doesn’t mean he will.

But you could play along, just long enough to wait for an opening. One hit against him, one small victory; that’s still your goal. If it comes at the cost of your soul—well, it’s not like there’s going to be much left of that anyway at the end of all this.

You close your eyes, forcing back the threat of tears. You don’t _want_ to agree to anything Dark ever says, but if it buys you time…

“Fine,” you spit out. “I agree. What exactly is it you want from me?”

Dark smirks. His hand slides up your arm, crooking a finger beneath your jaw and tilting your head up. “We’ll come to that later. You’re no use as you are now.”

He digs his nails into you, and the sudden pain makes you jolt. That smile widens into something malicious – the reality around you breaks entirely, shattering back into the same soulless grey as the manor you initially entered. Black cracks split the façade that remains, seeping through the ground, breaking apart the railings and the tiles and the table you were sitting at only moments ago.

It’s not just the void; it’s you. You scream at you realise, shoving against him again, but those same black cracks are already bleeding across your skin as well.

“What the fuck are you doing?!”

Dark lets you go, and you drop to your knees at his feet, gasping.

He stares down at you. “Ensuring you don’t defy me. Something with a little more power than just a physical brand.”

You claw at your throat where he was touching you, but there’s nothing there. Nothing physical, at least. No, it’s beneath the skin, black markings like tendrils of darkness roped around your neck, like a collar. Inside your veins. You can _feel_ it.

Even if you leave the void… the void is never going to leave _you_ , not now.

It feels so cold.

“You know what?” you say. You’re too exhausted to even be surprised anymore, sinking straight into horrified, hollow acceptance. “I changed my mind, just fucking _kill me_.”

Dark leans down and cups your cheek, a cruel smile on his face. “You agreed, didn’t you?”

“Not to this! I would’ve done what you said, I would’ve followed your instructions, you didn’t need to—”

“You were planning on turning against me the moment you had the chance.”

You fall abruptly silent, and Dark laughs. The sound sends shivers down your spine.

“Do you really think I haven’t seen your type before?”

“Dark, _please_.”

“Utterly foolish. But your tenacity is endearing.”

You close your eyes and take a deep, steadying breath. Yeah, because tenacity is the only thing you have left. This changes nothing; you’re still going to do whatever you can to hurt him at the first chance you get. Even if…

Your fingers lift to brush against your throat again. There’s nothing there at all, only a dull ache, the sensation of icy numbness buried deep within your flesh. What _is_ that? What is it capable of? Dark said it was to ensure you couldn’t defy him; how much power does it hold? That’s what you need to work out first.

You look at him with blank eyes, quietly, resignedly hateful. “Tell me what you want me to do.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long overdue, but there's _finally_ another chapter! This is a long one, 7200 words on this chapter alone. I honestly can't believe how much this has grown. I started writing this fic on a whim, just a silly, self-indulgent little story, and now somehow I have 55 pages and nearly 30,000 words. How the heck did that happen? (Send help.)
> 
>  **Chapter warnings:** Asphyxiation, knives, cutting/injury, poisoning (sort of), corruption/coercion, smooches of dubious consent, usual abusive and manipulative behaviour from Dark. Still and always an unhealthy relationship through and through.

The worst thing of all is the hollow numbness, the _acceptance_. You’d felt utterly repulsed at first, sickened to your stomach when you saw the way the darkness curled around your fingertips like fragments of smoke, responded to you and obeyed you. Like you were on the same wavelength; like you actually _belonged_ in this hellscape.

It wasn’t much at all, just tiny tugs here and there, but you could influence the void, just as much as it could influence you. The implications of that were horrifying.

You’d felt utterly repulsed at first, like you should have. But now…

Time didn’t work the same way here, impossible to keep track of, but it felt like it must have been weeks. You’d moved into the manor – the last place you wanted to be, but it wasn’t like you had a damn choice. Dark had told you that you weren’t to leave. You’d tried it once, but you’d barely set a foot away from the grounds before that _thing_ around your throat flared up in response, tightening until your head span and ears were ringing, the influence of Dark’s control dragging you back even without him around. It was like you were on a collar and a leash, and it was galling.

Just being in the manor raised the hairs on the back of your neck and set you on edge. The whole place felt _wrong_. The void was terrifying in its endless, uncaring nothingness, but at least it was a neutral nonexistence. The manor had an underlying atmosphere of malice to it, and that was even worse.

It was most concentrated in the epicentre; the entrance hall where the mirror wasn’t, where the empty frame sat like a gaping maw, a window into the pulsating, oil-slick heart of some dark entity. You avoided the hell out of that area; the room you’d claimed was as far away as you could get, at the edge of one of the manor’s wings. It was dusty, but still habitable; the bed was made, curtains intact, even old-fashioned clothes in the wardrobe still.

Dark’s presence had become a constant again. It was always there, that faint, high-pitched ringing in the back of your head. The sensation of his presence, of the connection you shared but wished you didn’t. That was nothing new, though being in here - in the void, in the manor - made the feeling sharper, somehow. More intense.

He visited like clockwork. You could only assume it was every evening, though it was hard to say for sure with your concept of time being so warped.

There was some small part of you that was grateful for it; grateful for _anything_ to break up the torturous monotony and solitude. Even if Dark was the only company you had, it was better than slowly losing your mind, trapped and alone.

Except that he was the reason you were now twisting strands of darkness around your fingers, starting to be able to feel the fabric of the void and warp it. It wasn’t even so much that he was teaching you; he just came in and commanded you to do these things and you didn’t dare to disobey. Not after the first time, at least. You’d been horrified at the idea of learning to manipulate the darkness – of letting it in, of learning to be like _him_ – and refused initially. Dark had gotten mad, and he was utterly terrifying when he was angry. You didn’t try to refuse again.

Now it was almost commonplace. It didn’t make you shudder with repulsion to draw the darkness in and create something new out of it. It was almost too easy; even oddly _fun_. If you forgot about the whole ‘manifestation of darkness’ thing and the fact it was probably corrupting you a little more every time you used it. After what felt like forever of wasting away with nothing to do but go around in circles in your own head, any kind of creative outlet was blissful.

And you didn’t hate Dark with the same simmering resentment as before. His voice was hypnotic, washing away memories and fears. He sounded so alluring, so reasonable, and sometimes you found yourself having entire conversations during his visits before remembering you were supposed to hate him.

You could see all of it happening; you could see exactly how you were losing yourself, and you couldn’t stop it. The nights when you curled in bed and let silent tears roll down your cheeks, it wasn’t because of the things you were doing but because you were scared by how little you cared about it.

In a way, it was almost ironic. When you had first stumbled across the manor, you’d been so desperately searching for some kind of weapon to use against Dark. Well, now you had one – one of the first things you’d learned to create was a knife. It had just taken selling your soul to him to get it.

You hadn’t planned it, the knife thing. It had just… happened.

Like learning any new skill, you’d started out small. Dark had shown you how to draw in the energy, the essence of the void, until it solidified into a tiny sphere in your palm. While Dark could do anything he pleased, creating entire tangible worlds of full colour and solid realism in the blink of an eye, all you had were blackened husks in vague, amorphous shapes. But you practiced until you could make something solid, a stick not much larger than a pencil. Then you worked out how to sharpen it down until you had a shiv.

The first thing you’d done with the shiv was carve the words ‘HATE HIM’ over and over into the walls of your room as a reminder to yourself. It looked like something out of a horror movie, but frankly that seemed pretty fitting.

Dark had only frowned at the words the next time he came to see you, raising his eyebrows but making no comment. The next day the words were gone, so you summoned the shiv and wrote them on your arm instead, painting the phrase on the wall with the blood as well just for good measure and laughing deliriously at how fucked up the whole thing was.

Cutting yourself hadn’t hurt, really. It was only the surface layers of skin, and besides, Dark had done far worse to you before. What _did_ hurt was when Dark had taken your arm that evening and bandaged it with surprising gentleness.

You hated it when he pretended to care. Because you knew full well it was just that, just pretend, just another fucking manipulation tactic, but you’d been so alone and trapped in this nightmare for so long that the mirage of tenderness made your heart ache bitterly.

The words were gone again when you woke up the next morning, not even the faintest scar betraying they’d been there.

You gave up after that, even though you needed the reminder more than ever. Hate him, hate him, hate him, and above all else, never fucking trust him.

The more you practiced, the better the things you could create, and the shiv developed into a fully-fledged knife. It just seemed like the natural evolution, and Dark didn’t disapprove. If anything, he seemed amused by your predilection towards violence. Getting the thing to exist in a stable form was trickier; the more complicated the object, the more readily it dissolved back into darkness the second you tried to touch or move it.

Still. You knew it was coming. You both knew, probably. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion; the course was set, collision inevitable, and you felt like you were watching from outside your own body as you progressed closer and closer to your demise.

Because you wanted to take that knife and stab Dark with it, and it was the worst idea you could have ever imagined but you were going to do it anyway.

The knife felt heavy and solid in your hand; you’d practiced in your own time until the thing felt real. It was pitch black and comprised of basic, blocky shapes like a bad design put through a 3D printer, but it was stable, and it was _sharp_.

Your heart had lived in your throat for days, stomach filled with ice. Every movement felt like you were sleepwalking. Dark spoke to you when he was there, but his words went straight through your head. You followed his directions without protest.

All of it has led to this. You sit on the edge of the bed and draw the knife into existence, balancing it on your upturned palms.

“You’re improving,” Dark notes. It’s a backhanded compliment; the better you got, the more you accepted the darkness, and the more you became his. The thought makes your chest tighten.

“What exactly is the point of me learning to do this?” you ask dully, no expectations behind the question. It’s not the first time you’ve asked, and Dark has never answered. Sometimes he gave a vague response about ‘shaping your potential’ and being ‘useful’, but never anything concrete. You don’t have any hopes for this time either.

The space around Dark crackles, flickering in red and blue as his smile grows tight. “Unfortunately, you still ask tiresome questions.”

“If you ever actually answered I wouldn’t need to keep asking over and over. Just saying.”

“Do you think you’re in any place to demand answers?” he replies smoothly. “I thought you were intelligent enough to have learned better than that by this point.”

Maybe you have learned better, because you grit your teeth and let the matter drop instead of pressing him further. He could be civil, if you didn’t push him, but his temper was a thoroughly unpredictable beast; sometimes he found your backtalk to simply be amusing, and other times it infuriated him. Talking to him was like walking through a minefield.

“Better.” He brushes his fingers across your cheek, as if the contact is a reward for your good behaviour. It makes you shudder, an equal mix of revulsion and unwilling allure. You hate how powerful it is, his charm and charisma woven around him like a glamour, even though you know so much better by now.

He smiles at your compliance – smug fucking bastard – and turns away.

Your fingers tighten around the hilt of your knife. It’s almost worse than when he’s mad; at least then it’s only fear you feel. It’s this – his quiet, self-assured, smug superiority – that makes you feel worse than worthless. Because you’re his, just a pawn, just a thing to be used and commanded and tossed aside when you’re not needed; he knows it and _you_ know it.

All you want is once, just once, to prove you’re not submitting that easily.

Your arms and legs and heart feel like lead as you stand, a white-knuckled grip on the knife. There’s a part of you whispering that it can’t be this easy, but it’s too late; you’re already moving on autopilot.

His auras are calm, nothing more than vague flickers around his silhouette, his back to you. For a moment you think you might even get away with it, but – no. How _stupid_. The second you raise your arm to strike you realise your mistake; his guard was never down, he was only goading you.

You don’t even get close. The strands of darkness wrapped around your neck flare into life, tightening in an instant. Not just tightening, but burning cold, like liquid nitrogen poured into your veins; the pain drives you to your knees, the knife falling from your limp grip, and you reach up to claw at your throat. You can’t even scream – the constriction is too great. No air, no sound. The pressure in your head is unbearable.

Darkness rapidly seeps into the edges of your vision, and fear seeps into your gut. It’s too quick, too violent—oh, god. Is he actually going to kill you like this? He couldn’t, he wouldn’t—though it’s not like you don’t kind of deserve it, you would’ve murdered him if you had the chance. Not that it would have ever worked since he’s an eldritch abomination masquerading in human form; you’re not even sure he can die. But you can. You very much can.

There are tears in your eyes, staining your cheeks, and you can’t tell if it’s from the pain, from being unable to breathe, or if it’s the realisation _you don’t want to die_. You hadn’t thought you would mind – you’d imagined that at least death would be an escape from this hellish existence – but faced with the reality of it, every instinct in you screams with the need to survive.

And Dark doesn’t care. He’s turned now, looking down on you. Just watching, lips twisted into a bitter, impassionate sneer, and fine, _fine_ , it’s not like you don’t deserve that. He’s the only thing you can see, the seething crackle of his auras the last light remaining in your fading vision.

It’s only when your vision completely blacks out – maybe you black out as well, just for a moment – that at last the pressure finally eases up. Just enough for you to choke in a lungful of air, even though you try to breathe it in too fast and only end up hacking and wheezing.

You don’t even get time to recover. Your head is still spinning, every part of you trembling. There’s blood beneath your fingernails where you’ve gouged into the flesh of your throat, trying to tear free from the thing around your neck—but of course that was always a futile task. It’s not a physical thing at all, but something else, some darkness, left embedded inside of you.

And it immediately starts to tighten again.

You shouldn’t waste the little breath you managed to catch on useless pleas, but the words burst out before you have a chance to think about it.

“Dark, please! _Stop!!_ ” Choked words, cracking on a sob. You wouldn’t put it past him to keep going, pushing you to near death and only allowing you to breathe so he can do it over and over again.

“I am not controlling it,” Dark says, voice dripping with cruel amusement.

The shock makes the pain and the constriction around your throat recede, and for a least the moment you can breathe again. “…what?”

Maybe you’re just too dizzy and shaken to think straight, but you don’t think he’s lying. Not this time. The truth is more painful for you, and he knows exactly how to use it to hurt you.

Dark makes you look up at him; doesn’t even bother stooping to your level, but forces you to tilt your head up with the toe of his polished shoes. Limp and sprawled on the floor, you don’t resist.

“There is a part of you that wants to give in and obey. There always has been.”

You close your eyes and grit your teeth. You don’t want to look at him; he’s fury, barely controlled, but retaining icy impassiveness for the sake of stabbing you in the heart with his smug-ass words instead.

“All I did was provide that part of you with more power.”

“The fuck do you mean?” you groan.

This time he does lean down, enough to take you by the neck – so very delicately compared to the way you were being choked before – and yanks you up into a sitting position. Since it’s clear you’re incapable of moving yourself for a while yet.

He doesn’t let go of your throat. His thumb caresses along your jaw, and although he smiles at you, the expression is cold and cruel.

“You want to obey,” he repeats. And fuck him, honestly. Fuck him for being right. There’s always been the temptation to stop fighting and just let him have his way – that first night when you had dinner together, how easy it would have been to just play along; how there were moments you hated him but wanted him all the same; that time when you’d been the one to seek him out and even freaking make out with him while drunk. It sickens you that that part of you exists, and sickens you even more that Dark _knows_ it exists.

“This—” he strokes over where the veins of darkness lie beneath your skin, and his touch makes you shudder “—is connected to that want. Your subconscious need to _give in to me_.”

“I do _not_ — _!_ ”

His grip suddenly tightens, and you find your head slamming back against the edge of the bed.

“Don’t test me!” he shouts, shell cracking, the fury he’s been holding back bursting free. He reigns himself in, but only just. His words are rage held back behind grit teeth.

“Insolent _idiot_. You really thought you could plunge a knife into my back? It was almost amusing; that you could be so stupid, and just how much you punished yourself for it. Your subconscious controls that collar around your throat. It would have been so very fitting if you had killed yourself with it, but _unfortunately_ it lost effect when you momentarily lost consciousness.”

Your blood runs cold, and you shrink back beneath his anger. You’d been so fucking terrified that he would murder you, or torture you indefinitely, pushing you to the brink of death and dragging you back just for fun, but at the same time you’d admitted you _deserved it_ …

It made sense. You hated it, but it made sense.

“I’m sorry,” you choke out.  “I’m _sorry!_ ”

There’s nothing but icy disdain in his eyes as his gaze pierces into you. “You will be.”

He stands and leaves the room, but you’re under no illusion that that’s the last of the matter. The whole manor crackles with malice – even more than usual – and you feel like you could suffocate with how tense the atmosphere is.

Every instinct screams to run, to get away while you have a fraction of an opportunity. But where would you even go? Dark controls everything here. Besides, you probably wouldn’t even let yourself, you think bitterly. It would be just the same as when you tried to leave the manor; take a few steps beyond, and then…

Your fingers raise to your throat. Whatever that is, whatever darkness he’s put in you, you hate it all the more now. The knowledge of how it works tastes like acid in your mouth.

It doesn’t even matter. From a more practical standpoint, you’re still too weak to run anyway. You push yourself to your feet, but your legs are shaking; you’re not sure if it was the pain, the lack of air, or some other deeper effect, but your little experience with the collar has left you completely drained.

All you manage is to sit yourself on the edge of the bed – it’s an improvement over staying prone on the floor, at least. You’re right back where you started, before you abandoned all sense and actually tried to attack Dark. The only difference is you don’t have the knife anymore. It wouldn’t do you any good if you did, that much is fucking clear.

At least Dark doesn’t keep you waiting. You can sense his return, like the change in pressure heralding an oncoming thunderstorm; it makes your head ache. Your fingers clutch at the edge of the bed, digging into the sheets until your knuckles are white.

Your heart is pounding in your ears. He’s going to hurt you. You don’t know how, and you’re terrified to find out, but it’s going to happen. It’s a bitter consolation, but at least you actually earned it this time. You grit your teeth.

Dark is composed again when he enters the room. Or at least wearing a mask of composure. You glance up at him and immediately regret it; he might seem calmer on the surface, but the cold fury in his eyes is so vicious that your throat tightens. He has the knife in his hands – your knife, you’d thought it had simply dissolved back into the void when you’d let go of it, but it seems Dark had taken it himself to use against you just for the cruel irony of it.

It’s dripping with something; some thick, viscous substance as black as pitch. You can’t explain why, but just looking at it is sickening. Maybe it’s because it reminds you of the heart of the manor, the essence of everything wrong with this place. Maybe that’s exactly what it is.

“Dark—” you attempt, but a single look from him silences you.

“I wouldn’t speak, unless you want your tongue cut out too,” he says, with a disturbing level of calmness. 

You shrink back as Dark looms over you, flinching when he grabs the fabric of your top. He drags it down enough to expose your shoulder and chest, right where the scar he’s already left branded into you stands out pale against the rest of your skin.

Protests bubble up in your throat, but you force yourself to bite your tongue. It’s not worth it, not this time.

The silence doesn’t last. Dark sinks the knife into you with little preamble and even less care, carving over the top of the first line of the brand. The blade grinds against the bones of your ribs; you jerk away instinctively, a cry of pain slipping past your lips, but Dark was clearly expecting that. He shoves you onto your back and pins you down and continues working.

You could have probably stayed quiet if it was just the knife; it was surprise that forced the first sound out of you. And it _hurts,_ stinging violently as Dark drags the blade across flesh and splits the scar tissue there open all over again, carving the brand anew, but you can deal with that sort of pain by now. It’s sick that you’re pretty much used to it.

No. It’s that black substance, dripping from the knife like thick, poison ichor; the second it gets into the wound it fires agony through every nerve it touches. The frantic pounding of your heart only spreads it faster through your system.

You shriek and writhe, trying to push Dark off. Not that it would do much good. It’s already in your bloodstream, burning like acid. It’s worst closest to the wound, and the wound is all too close to your heart. You’re terrified it’s going to be like one of those venoms that can cause your heart to stop; every beat of your pulse feels agonising, your chest constricting so tight you can barely breathe, every cell screaming as your body tries to reject its corruption.

With no patience left for you at all, Dark only clamps a hand over your mouth to silence you.

You stop feeling the cut of the blade at all. The only thing you can feel is the burning, utterly unrelenting. Like a fever, but a hundred times worse. It’s terrifying how rapidly you can feel the dissociation, the delirium starting to settle in.

Dark finishes re-carving the brand and steps back; with all the strength you have left to muster you reach up and clutch your fingers desperately into the sleeve of his suit.

“Make it stop,” you manage to plead. The pitch of your words rises, almost cracking on a sob. “Dark, it’s g-going to _kill me_.”

 “I doubt that,” Dark dismisses, shaking you off. For a moment he simply stares at you with callous distaste, but gradually the expression softens. At least your suffering seems to sate his anger. “Do you understand why you infuriate me? You have so much potential. There is no limit to the things I could help you achieve, if you would only _learn your place_.”

You can’t focus on his words at all. You can barely even look at him, vision blurring into a feverish haze. The only thing you’re aware of is the blissful cold of his fingers as he cups your jaw. It does nothing to lessen the pain, but the caress is cool enough to be soothing against your burning skin. You turn your face into his touch without even realising what you’re doing.

Dark huffs a sordidly amused laugh. He trails his touch over your collarbones and down to the marking on your chest, bleeding a sluggish mix of blood and ichor. He digs his fingers into the open wound just to hear you cry out.

“You belong to me, do you understand?” Dark says, dangerously quiet.

That’s the last thing you’re aware of.

Dark leaves at some point, but all your senses have been consumed by the fire eating through your veins. It feels like you’re going to burn up, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The urge to try and claw out of your own skin is unbearable.

Dark said it wasn’t likely to kill you; that’s the only hope you have to hold on to. It’s just a like a fever, that’s all. The most godawful one you could have ever imagined, but—you just have to get through it.

Just get through it, and not think about what the hell he’s put in you. Because you’d be fucking _lucky_ if some kind of poison is all it is.

The wound throbs like a second heartbeat, and your head echoes with the creaks and groans of the manor, of the dimensions twisting and warping beyond the void. Your limbs feel like lead. You can even tell if your asleep or awake; it makes no difference. You think you open your eyes, but only see the same feverish delusions in violent shades of black and blue and red.

Unconsciousness is the far preferable option. You flit fitfully in and out of awareness; the moments you wake are defined with cold sweat and choked-back screams dying on your lips from nightmares you can’t remember. There’s not enough strength in your body to move, and it drags you back under before you have the chance to gather any.

You could never grasp the concept of time here, and like this it’s even worse. By the time the fever breaks, it feels like days have passed, but you have no idea how much time you’ve really lost.

Dark is nowhere to be found, for which you’re thankful. Except that when you wake, you realise you’re in bed; you’d only been laid on the edge before, and you couldn’t have had the strength to move yourself.

The realisation makes you shudder.  There’s something lowkey terrifying in knowing Dark has been around you – had picked you up and moved you, apparently – while you were unconscious.

Finally pulling yourself together enough to get up is a slow process. The poison, fever, whatever the hell he did you, has left you ravaged and drained, like fire gutting you from the inside out. Your fingers shake even lifting your hand, but you manage raise them to your chest; the outline of the brand is vivid in torn flesh.

You stay in bed longer, pulling the covers over your head. It’s partially that you don’t have the strength, but maybe more than you’d like to admit that you just don’t want to have to face the nightmare that is existing in this place.

But as much as you don’t want to face reality – or worse, Dark – you can’t stand doing absolutely nothing either. As your strength seeps back in, so does restlessness.

There are mirrors in the manor – actual mirrors, not just the fucked up, gaping hellhole in the place of the mirror that used to hang in the entrance hall. One of the first things you do once your strength returns is to find one; you’re dreading it, but you have to see what he’s done this time. You know the shape of the mark – you know it intimately well, having traced the scar of it from the first branding a thousand times – but you need to see how bad the damage is. It hasn’t healed like your self-inflicted cuts did. The wound still feels raw and open.

Your stomach drops the moment you see it, chest tightening. Bile rises in your throat.

That’s—it’s worse. Worse than you’d imagined. The wound is scabbed over, deep crimson mixed with the black of the ichor, but at the edges of it the skin has turned a sickening grey-blue as though it were rotting away. Veins stand out vividly, like a spiderweb radiating from the wound, crawling over your shoulder, down your arm and winding around your throat, dark as the poison that flowed through them.

That thing around your throat – the collar, whatever it was Dark placed on you – is visible now. Black as the void, wrapped like ropes around your neck. Of course, you were more than aware that _that_ was there, but seeing it…

It’s like you’re a monster, a broken shell slowly being corrupted. And it hurts like a stab through the heart, because you can’t even deny that’s probably exactly what you’re becoming.

The manor feels suffocating, even more so than usual. You can’t stand catching sight of your own reflection. You turn around the mirrors you can, but all too many are built into the walls or the front of wardrobe doors. As tempting as it is to smash them, that doesn’t feel like a good idea either. You have bad memories of broken mirrors from the very first night you met Dark, your first little venture into the void. God, that feels like a lifetime ago.

So you leave. Not that you can go far, but there are the sprawling grounds beyond the manor which you’re apparently free to wander. At first that’s all you do, wishing you could get lost on the paths that wind through the trees and never have to go back.

You get used to it, though. The mark still aches, you can still feel it pulse, but it becomes just another background sensation. You adapt to the corruption like you’ve adapted to Dark’s presence in your head, and to existing in the void. At first it feels unbearable, the worst thing imaginable, that you could never live with it. But you do, because you have no choice.

You get used to this new level of awful too. Dark hasn’t returned to see you since, which is probably for the best, but the solitude and boredom quickly starts seeping back in place of your resentment of him. You don’t want to start trying to play with creating things from the darkness again, especially with Dark’s mark the way it is, but you need to do _something_.

The manor grounds and overgrown and unkept. The structure and careful planning of the place says that it was well-tended at one point, but it seems decades since anyone’s looked after it now.

Gardening was hardly your forte or even your intention, but what started with simply clearing the paths so you could pace freely gradually develops into taking care of small patches of the garden. Everything is washed out and muted in this version of the manor that’s bled into the void, but… there’s flowers. You find some struggling to grow beneath a blanket of ivy, and carefully free them. The fact there’s something like that, _here_ of all places, is inexplicably reassuring.

It’s something so mundane, so normal, that it makes you feel halfway human again. But of course, you should have figured by now that you can’t have anything nice without Dark ruining it.

All you’re doing is clearing some weeds when you sense his approach, and you tense. All pleasure immediately drains from the task, the comfort of the garden shattered in an instant. You stand and face him as he walks towards you; he’s like a black hole of energy, even this faded facsimile of the world warping and darkening around him. It’s a terrifying thing to stare down.

“Dark,” you greet blandly; no sense doing anything that might spark his temper this early.

His eyes drop to your shoulder. With the wound not healing properly – and unlikely ever to, you imagine; it’s not improved at all in all this time – you’ve taken to wearing tank tops with thin straps. You hate having it on display, but it’s worse to have anything over the top of it. Any fabric ends up constantly catching and yanking on the torn skin, saturated by the ooze of blood and ichor until it’s sticking painfully by the end of the day.

Dark smirks to see his handiwork, and you self-consciously raise your hand to try to hide the worst of it. It doesn’t do much good; it’s the way the darkness has spread through your veins, permanently tattooed beneath your skin, that makes it just as obvious how much damage Dark has done.

He reaches out, and you flinch instinctively. “Does it hurt?” Dark asks. As if he gives a shit.

He does make the question sound genuine, though. It’s been long enough that his anger from your last encounter is forgotten. Almost literally; as if he’d never been mad at you, never hurt you, as if he was always concerned for your wellbeing. God. Does he think you’re fucking stupid? That you’re just going to forget it ever happened?

Dark touches the back of your hand where you’re covering the marking, and you reluctantly shift it out the way to let him see. “Answer me.”

“It’s fine,” you say flatly.

He lays his fingers against the wound; your breath catches, but it’s more just the anticipation of pain. It doesn’t actually hurt. If anything, the coolness of his touch is soothing. Some of the ache bleeds away, and you sigh.

“It’s fine,” you repeat, more genuinely this time. Not that he deserves anything genuine from you at all; he pretty much stabbed you and poisoned you and left you to suffer. It’s been… you don’t even know how long since then. Weeks. And _now_ he decides to show up and pretend to care?

You’re tempted to ask him where the fuck he’s been, but honestly? You don’t want to know.  Probably off torturing other people and ruining lives for his own twisted amusement. You just wish he’d stayed gone. Besides, there are more important questions.

“What—” you try to find a way to word it “—what _is_ it? The black stuff. What did you do to me?”

Dark doesn’t answer; no surprise there. He removes his hand and instead offers it, palm up, for you to take. “Let me show you something.”

You hesitate. He’s just waiting for you, expectantly, a small smile on his lips. Once upon a time it might have looked charming, but you’ve seen more than enough to know his offer is a demand and his confidence is arrogance.

The last time you met you tried to kill him. You’re more than a little wary of him acting nice now.

But you don’t have a choice. The corners of his eyes begin to crinkle with impatience, aura flaring out, so you take a breath and place your hand in his.

He closes his fingers around yours; a gentle grip on the surface, but you know that if you struggle that grip can turn vice-like in an instant. He laughs quietly. “After all this time, you still don’t trust me.”

Damn right you don’t.

He’s going heavy on the charm this time, trying to smooth over past infractions. And it shouldn’t work, you _wish_ it wouldn’t work, but he’s… he’s Dark. You don’t even know what he is. But he’s powerful, supernatural, and he can wield charm like a weapon. And you – human, worn down, already tainted with his darkness – aren’t in the best position to resist. Your heart skips a fraction when he brushes his thumb over your knuckles, and it’s not entirely fear.

You shudder as the world shifts around you, abruptly squinting your eyes shut at the glare of sunlight. Real sunlight. It’s the same as before, when Dark had brought you back out into the real world for just a moment. And you know what will happen if you let go.

Without meaning to, you clutch his hand a little tighter.

“What did you want to show me?” you ask, throat dry. You just want to get this over with.

He tilts his head, amused by your haste. “So paranoid. It’s nothing terrible. Look.” He gestures to the ground where you were working; there a section distinctly cleared from the tangle of the underbrush, a smattering of flowers attempting to thrive.

“…it’s exactly the same as it was in the void. What’s your point?”

He turns you towards him, and you find yourself standing uncomfortably close. His grip on your hand stops you from pulling away. “Precisely,” he says. “Your actions in an immaterial realm impacted this reality.”

“Oh.”

You fall quiet. What does that even mean? Dark seems pleased, and he’s bothering to waste time on you again. Trying to charm you instead of hurt you. What, because you’re useful? You didn’t even mean to do anything; you _didn’t_ do anything. It’s just that the boundary between dimensions is weak here, the manor in both places leeching into the other.

“You have more power than you realise,” Dark says, leaning in to murmur the words beside your ear. You shiver.

But you don’t care. You don’t _want_ power, you just want to be left alone to live your damn life. But the way he says it… like he’s pleased with you, like you did something praiseworthy. That has more impact than you want to admit. You always were so eager to please.

There’s something else that bothers you. You shouldn’t have any power here at all; the more you think about it, the more you wonder if it isn’t tied to the darkness spreading from the wound Dark left. The more darkness inside you, the more connected you are to the void.

It’s definitely not a good thing.

Dark can sense you wavering. He leans down and breaks the stalks of one of the flowers, offering it to you. You only stare – he hasn’t bothered trying to charm you this much since the very first date. To do so now, after all the fucking abuse he’s put you through, is jarring. And infuriating.

He tucks the flower behind your ear when you don’t take it. You immediately jerk your hand up to rip it away – it’s _insulting_ , more than anything – but he grabs your wrist quicker. He’s still smiling, a little icily now, but the strength of his grip reminds you exactly who you’re attempting to defy.

Your stomach twists into knots. He’s almost more dangerous like this, more unpredictable. You’re walking on eggshells.

You leave the flower where it is.

“Why did you bother coming back?” you ask him.

Dark laughs. “I never intended to leave you.” He says it like a reassurance, but there’s a darker meaning beneath – of course he’s never going to leave you, he never has any intention of letting you go. You’re going to be together forever. “You simply seemed upset… I thought it would be better to give you the space to calm down and accept your place here.”

 _You_ were upset?! _You_ were the one who needed to calm down?!

“You _stabbed_ me,” you hiss, gesturing at the marking on your chest.

“You would have attempted to murder me. If you could,” Dark replies coolly. He brushes a strand of hair out of your face. “But I am willing to overlook that lapse of judgement.”

He can make it sound so reasonable, as if he’s the one being generous and forgiving in this situation. And the worst of it is that you can almost believe him. You attacked him. You were more than out of line.

“Why don’t we try this again?” he offers, almost a purr.

Colour bleeds out of the world around you, sunlight paling into the hazy grey twilight of the void’s imitation manor. Home, you think with a relieved sigh, before realising with a sickening jolt that you now consider the void _home_.

The flower doesn’t survive the slip between dimensions, crumbling into monochrome ash.

Dark doesn’t let you go, even though you’re safe to stand alone here. He’s still holding your hand, still too close. Uncomfortably close. You might have been able to hear his heartbeat, if he had one. You’re not sure he does, and you don’t care about finding out.

The wound aches – not pain, like it’s been before, but more like… a yearning. Like it’s responding to Dark’s presence, like the darkness corrupting your body belongs to him, can feel the presence of its master and wants to return. Wants to be closer. It’s something so much more subtle than when Dark had hijacked physical control of your body before; in fact, you don’t think it’s Dark trying to control you, not directly.

It’s like what he said about the collar; it’s _you_. Your darker thoughts, your weaknesses, the part of you that wants to give up and give in and let him use you and _enjoy it_. He’s just feeding it.

You’re not even consciously aware of having leaned into Dark’s embrace until it’s too late, moving as though you were in a trance. Dark smirks and snakes an arm around your waist.

“Better,” he commends. The compliment pleases you inordinately more than it should.

“Dark—” you try to protest. Whatever this is, you don’t like it. You can’t think properly, mind hazy. There’s a sick sensation in the pit of your stomach screaming that this is wrong, so fucking wrong, but at the same time letting him hold you feels so nice. The coolness of his touch, the soft static of his aura caressing against your skin. The way he tilts your head back, his lips against yours—

 _Stop!_ God, you need to stop this, but your body won’t respond. Well, not to you; it sure responds to Dark. You melt into the kiss, parting your lips to allow Dark to deepen it. He tastes you slowly and ever so thoroughly, until your knees feel weak and you let all your weight sink into his arms.

His hand brushes over your wound, and it flares with pleasure instead of pain. The soft sound you make is uncomfortably close to a moan.

This is wrong. So, so wrong, but you’re pressed against him and kissing him back and you can’t deny it feels good. 

Your mind is still reeling – how did things get turned around so quickly? How can he have this much power over you? You can’t break free from the spell at all.

Dark is the one who finally pulls away, a smug smile on his face. “You really are turning into something special,” he murmurs to you, low and seductive.

Liar. You can’t fight him – so much of you doesn’t _want_ to fight him – so you allow him to hold you against him, your head resting on his shoulder. You allow him to pretend you actually mean something to him. But you know he’s lying.

Turning into something special? As if. The only thing he’s turning you into is his puppet. You know it with sickening certainty; you’re not getting out of this without becoming a monster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just gonna throw a quick update at the end here; I am _terrible_ at actually finishing multichapters, and do expect several month waits between chapters at this point, BUT. I actually have an end goal for this fic now. I've got two more chapters planned to round it out and finish it off; I'm not sure when I'll get round to writing them, but there _is_ a plan. So that's nice.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey. Wow. Look. It's a chapter!! I am still working on this story and fully intend to finish it; I've only got one chapter remaining to round it all out and tie the story together. It's not going to be a happy ending, because honestly, it couldn't be. That would defeat the whole point of this thing. You can try to hold out as long as you can, but resisting Dark is always futile in the end.
> 
> That comes later, though. In the meantime, this is a thing. I'm mostly very happy with this chapter, because it was a lot of fun. But ocassionally I flip to the complete opposite and think it's stupid, it's too OP, the ending... incident... comes on to suddenly and doesn't make sense/I didn't write the mental dissociation involved well enough. But. It is what it is, and I hope what it is is enjoyable, at least.
> 
> (Legit though, I'm really excited to have this done and be getting so close to finishing this story. It's been a ride. <3)
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Dark is a manipulative, abusive asshole like always (it's slightly more lowkey this chapter, 'cause he's playing nice most of the time, but he definitely still has his moments), dissociation/altered mental state, violence, somewhat gory murder of a random innocent.

Things were getting… better. Or it would seem so, from an outside perspective; really it only left you feeling even more uneasy. Since your moment together in the garden, Dark had maintained his mostly pleasant façade, and it just felt so _wrong._

It was the dissonance between knowing how much of a monster he was, all the ways he was capable of hurting you, contrasted to the way he smiled charmingly and drew you cloyingly into conversation whenever he came to see you. If he was being nice, it was only because he wanted something. You just didn’t know what, and that had you on edge.

You tried to avoid him when you could, because being around Dark brought nothing but intensely conflicted feelings, leaving you shaken and disorientated in his wake. He always had a way of finding you though.

You couldn’t leave the manor’s grounds without permission, but today you’d gone as far as you could. You sat with your back against the stone column that served as a gatepost, although the gates themselves had long since ceased to exist. And wasn’t that just another cruel irony; the way was wide open, almost begging you to get out and _run_ , but the second you stepped outside you knew the pain would start.

You’re almost tempted to do it anyway, just to feel the collar around your throat tighten and choke you, because _that_ is what Dark does to you and you can’t ever, ever let yourself forget it. You can’t let your guard down.

Easy enough to tell yourself that when you’re alone. Yet the moment Dark turns up, all charm and soft, reasonable words, he starts worming his way under your skin again. You’re so fucking weak and you hate it.

The paved road leads from the main doors of the manor and winds down the shorter stretch of grounds at the front of the house, but once it reaches the boundary of the gates where you’re sitting it… just sort of trails out of existence. A few adventurous paving slabs reach out into the open space beyond, only to be consumed by the darkness of the void. It’s unsettling, having a place that seems so real and physical fade out into empty nothingness, but at least that’s a form of unsettling that you’re familiar with.

Looking out into the void makes your stomach churn. It’s so wrong, the lack of existence. You can’t go out there and you don’t particularly _want_ to go out there, but—there’s still a part of you that craves escape. What if you _could_ run? What if you could plunge into the void and keep searching until you found a way out?

It’s not like you can die in here, not really. Dark’s the only one who could kill you, or to allow something else to kill you. You don’t need to eat or drink; you haven’t since you got here. You probably don’t need to sleep either. You only do that out of habit, and because being unconscious is a blissful relief from having to face this wretched reality.

The only thing stopping you is the collar around your throat, and maybe the fact that being out in the void tends to saturate you with its negativity and despair until you feel like you’re going break completely.

You’re probably not able to die so easily, but losing your mind is another story.

The hairs on the back of your neck begin to prickle and you tense, jerking out of your thoughts. Dark is here; within the manor grounds, at the very least. You can always sense his presence now. And he can sense you, it seems. It doesn’t take long for him to find you.

You stare resolutely out into the void as Dark approaches, refusing to acknowledge him. He comes to a halt in front of you, hands held relaxed behind his back as he seems to join you in staring into the abyss.

“Do you want to go out there?” he asks after a quiet moment; it’s not an accusation, but a curious, genuine question. At least, he makes it sound genuine.

Surprise makes you glance up at him. “…what?”

You don’t know how to answer that, or if you even should. Because he’s got to be setting you up for something.

Dark looks down at you with that calculated smile that never reaches his eyes, and he offers you his hand. You take it, if only because being seated while Dark stands looming over you makes you feel even more small and vulnerable than you normally do around him.

His touch is cold, like always. Unnatural. You let him help you to your feet and then immediately let go.

“I could teach you to navigate the void, if you like,” he offers. There’s always something so… seductive, so tempting in his voice when he offers something that way, like he’s trying to entice you into a deal.

“Why?” you respond, maybe a little bluntly, but how could you not be suspicious? He has to know you’d only try to get out of there if you could.

Dark chuckles, as if amused by your wariness. He brushes his fingers against your arm, a gentle yet possessive gesture. You shiver at his touch.

“Because you’re going to be here forever,” he says; it’s a statement of fact, nothing less, and you hate it. “I cannot be around to babysit you at all times; it is to both your benefit and mine if you have at least some measure of self-reliance.”

Since when has he given any sort of a shit about _that?_ He’s been perfectly happy to leave you languishing and slowly going stir-crazy inside the manor thus far. But then, he had been teaching you to manipulate the darkness as well, before you’d messed that up by trying to attack him. Still. It worries you. This is _Dark_ ; you doubt anything he does is for anyone’s benefit but his own.

You’re silent for a long while – too long, really, but Dark doesn’t push you. He doesn’t need to. After all, what choice do you have? You don’t trust Dark’s motives, but you know it would be useful to know your way around better.

“Alright,” you agree.

“Good. Then follow me.”

Dark steps out in the void and walks ahead, so at ease with being there. Of course he is, this is where he belongs. It’s a stark contrast to the way your stomach plunges the moment you step into the vast emptiness. Visually, it makes your head hurt; it’s like those sensory deprivation experiments that end in people hallucinating and half-mad from the lack of stimuli. The void is that, but _worse_.

Your fingers drift to your throat, twitching instinctively in expectation of the collar flaring into life. But of course, you have permission now, and Dark is here with you. You’re _obeying_. The corruption remains inert beneath your skin.

Dark’s red and blue auras are the only semblance of light of colour in this place; you stick close behind him, not wanting to be near but more afraid of getting lost. A glance behind shows the manor has faded out of view, more quickly than it had any right to, and you hate feeling so cut off from your one solid foothold in this plane of existence.

Finally, Dark comes to a stop and turns to face you. He spreads his arms out, gesturing to both everything and nothing. “There are no rules here,” he says. An arrogant little smile flashes across his face, and then he’s simply _gone_ —you hear his voice from behind you, far too close, and you jerk away in surprise. Of course he can fucking teleport too.

“This plane exists between realities, a crack in dimensions,” he continues, and you can _feel_ his auras brushing against your skin. He’s that close to you. You stay frozen in place, skin pricking, until his presence vanishes again and he returns to his original position in front of you, and you breathe out a shuddering sigh of relief.

“The void is not subject to any of the laws of your world. The only reason you remain grounded is your mind expects the same physics to be in effect, even when it is clear to anyone with half a mind that there is no ground, nor sky, nor direction in any capacity whatsoever.”

You close your eyes and try not to think about that too hard. You _like_ the illusion of ground beneath your feet.

“So what?” you ask.

“So, there is nothing stopping you taking a single step forward and finding yourself back at the manor. For all intents and purposes, distance and direction are irrelevant.”

“I don’t think this is navigation so much as a whole new existential crisis,” you mutter.

Dark seems amused at that. “There are no fixed points in the void beyond locations like the manor, where other dimensions bleed in and create an anchor, or other entities that exist within here. Yourself, for example.”

“Entities… plural?” You don’t like the sound of that; the thought makes your blood runs cold. “Do you mean just you and I, or are there… other things in here with us?”

This time, Dark laughs outright; it’s patronising, like he’s only mocking your concern. “Sometimes things slip through the cracks, yes. You yourself have managed to find yourself in my domain at neither your nor my intention before. Occasionally there are… associates of mine who may enter here, but the rest are mainly lost souls who have become trapped; they perish soon enough.”

You dread to think what sort of monsters Dark would associate himself with. But the latter feels more pertinent to you; you’ve been one of those lost souls wandering the darkness before, and if you ever tried to escape, you may yet meet the same fate. “Do they die from being in here, or do you… go and find them?”

Dark doesn’t answer that, but his cold, cruel smile is telling enough.

“In any case,” he says, “you need nothing more than to be able to sense the point or person you wish to go to.”

“Dark, I… I can’t fucking sense shit and teleport around just like that, I’m not like you! I’m _human_ , I’m not meant to be here.”

He steps forward, and you regret the words immediately. Dark reaches up with terrifying speed, grasping your neck; it’s not enough to choke you, but the threat is very real. The pressure lessens, and then he’s simply caressing your throat instead. Tracing the lines of black ichor embedded deeply into your veins.

“Do you really still believe that?” he asks, voice suddenly icy.

Fuck. Fuck him. You hate it when he does that, the way he can use words like weapons and undermine every ounce of your confidence in a single moment. Because honestly? At this point you don’t even know if you’re human anymore, or if you’re… something else. Something broken, corrupt, warped, just a puppet for Dark to toy with. It’s horrifying to think about.

He leans back, a smug smile back on his face. He knows his words hit home. “But I suppose you are correct. Your kind are always so small-minded; you cannot even fathom the wealth of possibilities that are available to you here. So, let’s start with something simple. I imagine you have experienced dreams where you are capable of flying?”

“…I guess. Rarely, but. Once or twice.”

Dark tilts his head, as if that’s explanation enough then. “It’s as simple as that. As the laws of physics do not apply in your dreams, nor do they apply here. If you are able to grasp that concept, you should be able to do as you please.”

“I _wish_ this was nothing but a bad dream.” You’re making a joke of it, but at the same time it hurts just how true the statement is.

Dark smirks. “Follow me,” he says again.

He turns and vanishes, leaving you abruptly alone in the darkness. You feel your chest tighten—it’s _fine_ , you tell yourself, he’s not planning to leave you this time, and even if he does, so what? You’re better off without him, you’ll find your own way out. But the vast, overwhelming emptiness feels suffocating without him there.

You focus on the irritation rather than the fear curling in your gut. You just _said_ you couldn’t do these things, and he’s expecting you to teleport after him? That’s fucking _bullshit_. You don’t even know where he would have gone to in order to follow him there.

But you don’t want to stay too long alone in the open void either. He said… you could sense fixed points? It does sort of make sense to you; you’ve noticed that you’re able to feel when Dark is nearby already.

And fuck Dark, honestly, but maybe you could do the same thing to work out where the manor is and just go back there? The first time you ever found the manor you did something similar without even intending to; you’d just… felt something more solid amongst the endless darkness and headed there. You could do it again.

You close your eyes and try to feel the void around you. It’s strange, not a sense in the normal way you’d use the word, but there’s… something. Like being surrounded by water and having something else breach the surface, and there’s the slightest hint of pressure as the displacement buffers against you.

Your skin prickles; yeah, you know where Dark is. The manor too. It’s tempting to try and make your way back to the manor, feigning ignorance, but to flagrantly disobey Dark like that is too risky to warrant it at this point.

It’s easier to keep your eyes closed. Not that it makes any difference, realistically, but it makes it somewhat easier for your mind to handle. Easier to pretend you’re just dreaming awake. Easier to step towards where you feel Dark is; hesitantly, at first, but then a few steps more and the sense of his presence is overwhelming and you jerk your eyes open again, just in time to stumble straight into him.

Despite your clumsy entrance, Dark allows you to fall against his chest, drawing you into an embrace. You realise you’re shaking; you’d seemingly only walked forward a little, but the exertion feels far greater.

“See?” he says, voice a low, approving purr. “You’re capable of so much more than you give yourself credit for.”

He wasn’t there before. You _knew_ that. There was no way the few steps you’d taken could have led you to him, not by any normal laws of physics you knew. “Did I… teleport?”

Dark laughs, though not unkindly this time. “Not quite; you simply moved through the void in the most efficient way it allows.”

You swallow. You can do that. With a little more practice, you could probably do it quite easily; figuring out where you need to go is definitely the trickiest bit, but once you know that, you think you really could just… go there.

It’s the same as when you were learning to manipulate the darkness, though. It _scares_ you that you’re even capable of these things at all.

“Again,” Dark commands. He lets you go, then with a nod of his head he leaves you.

Again. There’s still that gnawing sensation in the pit of your stomach that says this is unnatural, you shouldn’t be able to do this, you shouldn’t be listening to Dark. But it’s easier, the second time, and there’s something almost exhilarating about it as you find yourself beside Dark again.

“Good. Now faster.”

The process repeats, and—it _is_ exhilarating. Each time you move with more confidence, and then you’re running, and you’re actually able to keep up with Dark, and it’s such a rush. It’s only a façade of it, but it feels like _freedom_. God. It’s been so long since you even knew what that felt like, what it’s like to feel halfway alive.

It aches at the same time, because it’s such a temporary, fleeting illusion of freedom and you know it, but at the same time… it’s fun. You’re having fun. With Dark.

You’re getting too caught up in this. A voice in the back of your mind screams in warning, but the pounding of your pulse drowns it out.

Eventually, Dark allows you to stop. You’re panting with the exertion of having followed him what feels like halfway through the entire damn void, but you’re grinning despite your exhaustion. Dark, meanwhile, doesn’t look like he’s even moved a muscle the entire time. But he smiles at you, and this time you don’t particularly notice or care that the warmth never reaches his eyes.

“Good,” Dark purrs, and you feel the weight of his praise like it was a physical touch. He gestures below you with a tilt of his head, and you follow his gaze. “Look.”

Your confidence drains, and you instinctively grab hold of Dark’s wrist. That’s—the manor is there, but _below_ you. As if you were forty foot in the air above it and upside down, and you _know_ that it’s all meaningless—direction, distance, any of it—but your mind and stomach protest at the sickening viewpoint. The emptiness of the void makes it easier, but actually _seeing_ just how little the laws of physics really apply is a little brain-breaking.

You swallow, worried you’re going to fall, but Dark grounds you. Without him there you probably _would_ fall, just because your mind thinks you should.

“Can we… go down?” you ask, a little shakily.

“There is no need. You’re here, and you’re safe with me.”

You tear your eyes away from the sight and focus on Dark instead. Safe is the last thing you are with Dark around, but it’s all relative really.

You nod and find yourself relaxing despite yourself.

“You did well,” Dark says, and the praise makes your heart flutter. “Sit. I have a gift for you.”

Now that some of the high of your newfound skills is wearing off, you find your wariness growing back in its place. A gift? Whatever Dark has to offer, you’re not sure you want it.

There’s nowhere to sit, so you end up just kneeling in front of Dark. Shit. You should have thought that through more – the position feels all too natural, all too right, like this is where you belong, and you hate that any part of you feels that way at all.

Dark sits as well; of course he doesn’t need to lower himself to your level, simply manipulating the void to his whims and providing himself a ledge to sit against. He’s still looming over you, but the difference isn’t as large as if he’d still been standing.

“Give me your hands,” he commands. “Palms up.”

You hesitate for a moment, but it’s not worth disobeying at this point. You’re not exactly in any position to do so. You offer him your hands, and he takes your wrists and pulls them up towards him. He holds your hands in one of his own, while the other draws something out of the darkness. You’re familiar with the action now; it’s the same way he was teaching you to manipulate the void to create something out of nothing.

It’s more than just a little reminiscent of that, in fact – it’s a pair of daggers that he creates, and you stare as he shapes them from pure black. He could form them in a single instant, but he’s drawing out the process for your benefit, so you can watch as he takes the same crude, simple little knife you’d made all those weeks ago and splits it into two, reworking each of the pieces into something beautiful and ornate and deadly.

Your breath catches, concern twisting in your gut. The last time the two of you were around knives created from the void like that, it didn’t end well. But that doesn’t seem to bother Dark; he finishes the daggers and places them in your waiting palms.

“W-what are these for?”

“It will be easier for you to not have to reform a weapon for yourself each time you need one, especially when you are still unfamiliar with the technique. These will continue to exist as long as I wish them to, and you will be able to summon them at will.”

Your head feels like it’s spinning, lips parted with so many questions you want to ask but don’t even know where to start. Why on earth would you even _need_ a weapon? Why would Dark ever trust you with any after last time? Why is he teaching you how to navigate through the void and then fucking _arming_ you?

What the hell is he planning to use you for?

“Dark, I don’t know if I…”

“They will need to anchored to you, however.”

There’s something in the way he says it, something dark in the way he looks at you, that makes your stomach sink. You’re definitely sure now that you don’t want this ‘gift’, but you can’t stop him. He has a tight grip on both of your wrists and you can’t pull away, even when threads of darkness curl in around his fingers and around the hilts of the daggers. You don’t like this; you _really_ don’t like this.

It’s like a fine chain, linking each dagger to his hands – to your hands – and that wouldn’t be particularly bad in itself, except for the way the darkness solidifies into a needle-like claw over each of Dark’s thumb nails. You know what’s coming and you try to yank your hands away, but Dark’s grip is bruisingly tight and you can’t move at all.

“Don’t— _!_ ”

Too late. Not that he would have given a shit about your protests anyway. The sharp tip of each claw pierces into the sensitive skin of your wrists, driving the chains deep into the flesh, and the white-hot pain of it makes you cry out.

You can _feel_ it, the threads of darkness crawling beneath your skin and taking root. ‘Anchoring’, you suppose. It’s not as bad as when Dark created the wound on your chest, but it’s still abhorrent, and the sensation beyond unpleasant. You squirm against Dark’s hold, but his grip is like iron.

When he finally lets go, your wrists feel raw. There’s an all too familiar shade of festering black tainting your veins, and you choke on a quiet sob in the back of your throat. You’re not sure if it’s out of horror or anger; hasn’t he done enough fucking damage to you already?

You drop the daggers and clutch your wrists to your chest, as if that will stop the pain or make the corruption go away.

“Those weapons are yours now,” Dark says, as if he’s done something wonderful for you and you should be _thankful_. “You should be able to reform them with almost no effort on your part.”

The chains and the daggers themselves have disintegrated back into the void, but you can still feel the pull of them. Dark’s right; it really wouldn’t take much to just tug minutely at fabric of this reality and have them reappear for you. You don’t fucking want to though.

“Why the hell did you do that?!” you demand, still smarting.

Dark smiles, an icy edge to the expression that reminds you to watch your tone. “Let’s return you to the manor now, shall we? Rest. Recover. Tomorrow you can practice more.”

A part of you seethes at that; what if you don’t fucking _want_ to practice more. Practice what? Traversing the void? Using the daggers? It’s too much, too suddenly, and you know he’s setting you up for something but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

“You did well today,” he says, softer. Trying to mollify you after the pain he’s caused. Again.

You don’t want to buy into that bullshit so easily, but hearing him praise you – especially since, yeah, you _did_ do pretty good getting around the void at least – still feels better than it should.

“Whatever,” you mumble.

Instead of replying, Dark grips your jaw and lifts your head, and for a moment you think he’s going to kiss you – you’re not sure if you’re relieved or disappointed when he doesn’t. Instead, he only runs his thumb over your lip, but even that much has your pulse quickening.

You scowl. You _hate_ that all he has to do is get all seductive and charming and he can still affect you that way, despite your better judgement.

“Go home,” he orders. “You are not to leave until I return for you tomorrow, understood?”

You nod. He cracks his neck in that way that makes your stomach flip every time you see it, and then smirks as he turns and departs, leaving you to make your own way back to the manor.

You breathe a heavy sigh of relief, tension you didn’t realise you were holding draining out of you. It’s impossible not to be on edge in one way or another when Dark is there with you. At least you’re capable of making your own way back now, you suppose. That’s a good thing. Probably.

All that’s left then is to brace yourself and prepare for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, and the day after that, then the rest of the week, until you end up losing track. Dark comes back for you every day and takes you out into the void, and you ‘practice’.

You find yourself looking forward to it, almost eagerly at times, before you remember exactly where you are and who Dark is. But it’s… fun. More so than when you’d been learning to manipulate the darkness, even. You’ve been trapped in here so long, feeling like you’re helpless and fading and that there’s nothing, _nothing_ you can do. And then you suddenly have the opportunity to make your own way through the void at Dark’s side—it’s hardly a freedom when he’s right there, and the void is a far cry from a pleasant place to be, but you’re doing _something_ and it makes you feel like you’re halfway living for the first time since you’ve been here.

He teaches you how to fight, and that’s… concerning. It twists your stomach into worried knots when you think about it, alone in the dead silence as you try to fall asleep; Dark must have his motives, and they can’t be good. Nothing Dark ever does is good for you.

When he’s there, though, it’s easy to forget all of that. His presence has the same hypnotic sway as always, and it’s a little sickening just how much you feel like you _want_ to please him.

You learn to move around with more finesse; to appear behind Dark instead of stumbling straight into him, or to the side or even above. You can make yourself move faster across short distances, lunging like lightning. You’ve not mastered the art of actually flying, which, according to what Dark had said should be _theoretically_ possible, but you don’t feel the need to try. You’re more than fine with just being able to jump to twice your own height as if barely weighed down by gravity. Not that gravity even exists here, but—it’s not something worth thinking about too hard, because if you do, your rational brain starts to kick in, and trying to apply any sense of reason in this place is a futile task and only detrimental to you.

It feels good, though. God, it feels _so_ good. You’ve never been able to do anything even remotely like this in your life, and it’s absolutely exhilarating. It makes you feel… powerful. You’ll never be even a fraction as powerful as Dark, obviously, but it makes you feel less like a worthless little puppet and more like someone who exists in their own right again.

Dark creates practice targets for you – vague, shadowy, mannequin-like things, faceless and disturbing to look at – and allows you to slice them apart as you please. As you suspected, reforming the daggers Dark created for you is easy. You can feel them there, just waiting. The same way you can feel Dark’s presence, the same way you can feel the pulse of the darkness embedded in your veins like a second heartbeat.

The practice mannequins are creepy, in all honesty, and taking out your frustrations by driving a blade through them and watching them dissolve like smoke back into the void is oddly therapeutic.

The best moments are when Dark actually demonstrates something for you. Those occasions are few and far between – more often Dark offers verbal corrections to your form, when he cares enough to pay attention to you for that long. But when he does show you a particular strike or attack in person… he’s terrifying. Amazing, but terrifying.

You’d started feeling confident. Stronger, capable. But you were _nothing_ compared to Dark. The way he demonstrates the attacks he wants you to learn has such a casual ease to it; he’s not even trying, it’s barely a flick of his wrist, yet he’s capable of utterly destroying the target in the blink of an eye. His movements are nothing but grace and strength. It’s barely a fraction of what he’s capable of, but even the little power he does show is far beyond your league.

It makes your heart skip a beat to watch him; it’s hard to focus on what he’s teaching you when all you can do is stare. It’s partially fear, but now that his violence isn’t directed at you, you can appreciate just how fucking _hot_ it is.

He really is the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome, well-dressed in that signature suit of his and radiating power.

And you’re really just a fucking _idiot_ for still finding him attractive after everything he’s done.

Despite everything, it’s… oddly enjoyable. Dark is still playing nice. He praises you when you do particularly well – succinctly, but any praise from Dark is hard-earned and valuable to you – and he rewards you with gentle touches when you’re done for the day. Taking your hand; his fingers gliding over your collarbones or tracing the marking on your chest; a thumb brushed along your jawline.

Fucking asshole. He knows exactly what he’s doing, exactly how it makes you react, and you hate it because you don’t _want_ to start thinking about him like that again. But when you’re together it’s so easy for him to get under your skin, into your head, and make you just forget everything.

It’s infuriating; you’re furious at him and furious at yourself. But there’s nothing you can do about it other than bite your tongue and try to ignore the butterflies in your stomach. You distract yourself by taking out your emotions on the stupid practice mannequins instead.

You’re not sure how much of it is due to the immaterial nature of the mannequins and how much is due to the dagger being incredibly sharp, but it’s surprisingly easy to throw your weight behind a well-aimed blow and take a practice dummy’s head clean off.

You catch Dark watching you after that particular little stunt, and at first you just think it’s amused approval in the tilt of his smile and the way he raises an eyebrow.

But—no. It’s more than that. You realise Dark is looking at you now with quiet expectation, but you don’t know what he’s expecting of you and he’s not about to give you any hints either, it seems. He’s just… waiting.

Then it clicks. You thought something felt off, but you didn’t immediately understand why. It’s faint, but there’s… something. Someone? Another presence in the void; unfamiliar and not meant to be there.

You freeze, hackles raising. You don’t like it. You don’t even know why, it just feels _wrong_ —like having a stranger come into your personal space. (Since when has the void been _your_ space?) Or like when you’ve had a bad day and your nerves are completely frayed, and absolutely every movement, every sound, the mere existence of another living creature, is just so _grating_ you’d give anything to make it _stop_.

Whatever the presence is, you want it out.

It’s not your place to decide, though. You glance at Dark and Dark meets your eyes, a cold, quiet smirk playing at the corners of his lips. He only nods; silent permission for you to do as you like.

You should have known right then that it wasn’t right. You should’ve listened to the alarm bells screaming in the back of your head, but they’re drowned out by the white noise and the ringing in your ears. You can’t think. Everything is a static haze, and your body is moving on autopilot.

The weight of the daggers feels firm and comforting in your hands. Pinpointing the source of the infraction is easy. You make your way there in an instant.

Lost soul. Was that what Dark called them?

It screams when it sees you. The sound wrenches at the silence of the void and claws at your ears like nails on a chalkboard.

Your pulse is racing and your throat is tight. You’re staring but you only see right through the thing in front of you. The sigil carved into your chest aches, the black poison in your veins burning.

Shut up. Shut _up_.

The level of utter vitriol, the _loathing_ you feel for the lost soul is completely irrational. But it just won’t _shut up_.

You sink one of the daggers into its diaphragm and the screams become wet and choked, blood bubbling up violent red against the lost soul’s sickly pale lips. There’s nothing but fear and horror in its eyes. Afraid. So afraid of this place. Afraid of the void. Afraid of you?

You curve the dagger up inside, beneath the ribcage, aiming for the heart. Holding it still while you drag the other dagger all the way across its torso, buried deep. Tearing it almost in half. So satisfying and visceral. More screams, but they don’t last long.

Afraid of you.

Afraid—afraid. You’re afraid.

You feel like you’re going to be sick.

The thing gurgles wetly, its last breath a hacking sob. Then it’s quiet. Silent, except for the drip drip drip of blood. And all you can do is stare.

You can’t process what you’re seeing. Your mind is still blank. But suddenly the silence feels suffocating, and the daggers too heavy in your white-knuckled grip. You let them fade back into the void. The weapons are gone, but there’s still blood on your hands.

That thing. The lost soul. It’s—

You can’t breathe. Wrong. This is wrong, you’re not—why can’t you _think?!_

Dark chuckles behind you, and the sound is the most cold, cruel thing you’ve ever heard.

“Wh… what did you…?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Dark assures you, and your awareness finally snaps back into place.

It’s a teenager, a kid. Not some mannequin or faceless phantom. It’s a fucking _kid_ , torn apart with their corpse bleeding out at your feet and this time you’re the one who screams. You feel like you’re going to be sick, only it’s not like you’ve had to eat the entire time you’ve been in the void so there’s nothing to come back up and you just end up dry-heaving, choking on your own sobbing breaths.

You can’t—you’re not—

You turn on Dark and shriek. “What the _fuck_ did you make me _do?!_ ”

He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even care; he’s as calm and collected as ever, only fucking _amused_ by the spectacle. “Again. I did nothing.”

“No… _no!!_ That wasn’t me! I didn’t—I didn’t mean to…...”

You didn’t mean to just fucking brutally murder an innocent kid who had the misfortune to be dragged into Dark’s games.

The reality of it hits you, and it feels like your entire world is crumbling around you. You’ve been through hell because of Dark – you’re _still_ in fucking hell – but in all this time you’ve never believed you were the same kind of monster that he was. There was always some humanity left in you, even if he corrupted you, used you.

“ _No_ ,” you insist again, almost screaming it at him. “You were controlling me, I would _never_ —”

His patience fractures and he cuts you off with a hand around your throat. If he used his full strength he could snap your neck without a second thought; his grip isn’t quite that tight, but it’s enough to immediately cut of all your air, crushing your windpipe and branding purple-mottled bruises into your skin.

“Be _quiet_ ,” he snaps, voice as sharp as ice. “That is quite enough of the ridiculous theatrics.”

There are tears streaming down your cheeks. You claw at his hand, trying to get him off you, get any air at all, but your efforts are futile and, frankly, pathetic.

Dark releases you and you fall to the floor in a trembling, sobbing heap.

“I was not controlling you.”

“Y-you set me up!” you gasp, choking desperately to get air back into your lungs.

Dark tilts his head. “I allowed some pathetic little creature to wander into my domain to see what you would do, yes. Everything else was done of your own accord.”

You… you believe him. You know what it feels like when he directly controls your action, and that wasn’t it. You just lost control of _yourself_.

And what does that say, that you default to murder when you lose control? You’re not—you _weren’t_ a bad person; not a great one and maybe there were times you got annoyed or upset or had shitty thoughts but you’d never do anything that fucking horrible, you don’t want to believe you’d be capable of something like that. You’ve just been trapped in here too long, saturated in the malice of the manor and corrupted by the darkness Dark has poured into your soul; that has to be it, it has to be because this isn’t who you are—it _can’t_ be. But he’s right, Dark is right like he always fucking is. The reasons don’t matter. It’s your fault.

It’s your fault, and you feel like you’re going to break under the weight of the guilt.

“It’s… it’s not the same though, right?” Your voice is too quiet now, rasping and broken. “Death doesn’t mean the same thing here. They’ll wake up back in the real world, it’ll just be like a bad dream.”

Dark smiles icily at you. “That only applies if their spirit is in this realm, but not their physical body. If both are present… well.”

You nod wordlessly. Of course. Dark wouldn’t give you a way out that easily.

You can practically feel your heart shattering.

There are still tears trickling from your eyes, but they’re silent now. You’re shaking, but just about able to breathe. (As if you have the _right_ to be breathing.) It just _hurts_ , so badly it overwhelms every thought and leaves you mindless and numb. You would have been perfectly content to just lay there and wait for the void to consume you, but you’ve already tested Dark’s patience more than enough.

When he kneels and hooks his arms beneath your shoulders and your knees, you don’t try to protest. In another situation, it might even have been flattering to have him pick you up and carry you bridal style. But you can’t feel anything at all right now.

You let your head rest against his shoulder, closing your eyes to shut out the rest of the world as Dark carries you back to the manor. “I didn’t mean to do it,” you say weakly.

“Of course you didn’t,” Dark replies. His voice is deep and smooth and soothing, a low rumble, pretending to be sympathetic but only on the shallowest level. “But I hope you know I’m very proud of you, pet.”

His words cut you to the core. Enough of a monster to make Dark proud of you; it’s the most damning thing he could have said.

You really are his.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** mind rape, mind break, negative mental thoughts/self-harm mentions/self-hatred, heavy impact play as punishment using floggers/riding crop/dragons tail (actually vaguely consensual for once, lol, but still really not healthy at all). It gets a little steamy at one point, but it’s more Dark using his powers to induce sensations of pleasure than any actual sexual contact; it doesn’t get worse than being pinned down and sharing a heated kiss in that regard (no worse than chapter 3 was). 
> 
> **Further side note:** the way the punishment is done in this chapter does veer kind of into something that’s more BDSM scene territory, but it’s not done in a way that’s healthy or what BDSM should be. Dark is a straight-up asshole, that’s kinda the point. So he does a lot of shit that is really not okay, and tbh the main character isn’t exactly going into it with a healthy mindset either and clearly keeps pushing through long after they should have stopped which is also a big no. The whole thing is just a mess and in no way representative of actual healthy, consensual BDSM. 
> 
> Also for the love of holy don’t let a dragons tail wrap with any kind of force, because you will end up with a bruise the size of your entire thigh and raised like a goddamn egg from just one misdirected hit. Never mind doing it multiple times. On purpose. Dark’s a dick.
> 
> (...I'm fine I'm not still miffed about when that happened to me before.)

“You cannot stay sulking forever,” Dark says.

You can damn well try. You wish Dark would just leave you to your misery, but he keeps coming back. Every morning and every evening like clockwork.

You ignore him like you have been for the last two days, rolling over and burrowing beneath the covers of your bed, trying to block out the ringing in your ears and pretend your skin doesn’t crawl in reaction to his presence. You don’t want to listen to him. Because he keeps acting like everything is _fine_ , like it doesn’t _matter_ that someone innocent is dead because of you. You suppose to him it really doesn’t matter; how many people has he murdered, or broken, or driven to kill themselves? He’s a goddamn monster.

And so are you.

The first night you cried until you ran out of tears, wrecked with guilt. But then… you hate it, because it’s exactly what Dark said. He had sat on the bed next to you and brushed your hair out of your face, and you’d turned your face into the pillow to hide from him.

“You are only reacting out of shock,” Dark had told you. “It will pass. There is no need for you to feel remorse; not now, not here.”

There was plenty of goddamn _need_ for you to feel remorse. But… you don’t. Dark was right. In the morning you only woke up feeling numb. The pain faded, all too quickly. But you still remember the warmth of blood on your hands, the satisfaction and the _power_ at how easy it was to break apart such a fragile creature.

It’s terrifying to catch yourself thinking that way. You were no fucking different from that poor teenager; you’d been lured in by Dark just the same, dumped in the void and left to run, like it was a _sport_. You’d just managed to survive longer. And how you’ve become the exact thing you were so terrified of. The demon lurking in the dark.

When you’d first come to the manor – god, it seems a lifetime ago now – you’d been searching for a weapon. A way to take out Dark. Because that murder would have been worth staining your soul with; you’d bear that burden if it meant taking out a monster. Take out the monster before the monster did any more damage, ruined any more lives.

But if you’re the monster now, doesn’t the same apply to you?

You’d considered it—you’d done more than just consider it. You’d drawn out the daggers Dark had created for you and run the edge of the blade along your wrists with shaking hands. You should do it. You wanted to. You fucking _deserved it_.

It would have been such a beautiful irony to kill yourself in the same way you’d tried to escape the void the very first time Dark had sunk his claws into you.

But, no. You couldn’t. Physically, you couldn’t, because Dark had known that too, where your thoughts would go and what you’d try. “You are to do nothing to harm yourself, do you understand?” he’d commanded before leaving you. And you couldn’t disobey.

The black, inky tendrils forming the collar around your neck had tensed and tightened in warning as you traced your veins with the tip of the daggers. You’d wanted to do it. You’d have been better off dead than a puppet in Dark’s thrall—no, just being a puppet you could live with, but not a puppet Dark used to hurt and kill others. If destroying yourself was the last act your humanity could grant you, at least you could pretend you died for a noble cause.

What an adorable delusion.

After all, you couldn’t have done it even if you tried, not while under Dark’s command. But more than that, you just… didn’t care enough anymore. You _should_. But shoulds were all you had left. Should feel guilt, should feel remorse, should hate what you’re becoming—what you _have_ become.

But Dark was pleased with you. You could be at Dark’s side.

What the _fuck_ has he done to you that you actually _want_ that?

“This is growing tiresome, pet,” Dark says. And you can tell, the patience in his voice is wearing thin. “You know you’re only pretending.”

You hate him for being right. You feel more guilty about not feeling guilty than actually guilty over what you’ve done, and you’re only clinging onto the scraps of your remorse out of sheer stubbornness.

You close your eyes and turn away, refusing to look at him. “…Hurt me,” you ask of him.

Dark is silent for a moment, then chuckles coldly. “Why would I do that? This time, you have done exactly as I desired of you, without even needing my control.”

The reminder is sickening, and a flash of anger makes your throat tighten. “Hurt me!” you yell. “I _murdered_ someone, I deserve some kind of retribution!”

He delicately raises an eyebrow. “You want to be punished?”

“Please, Dark.” If you can’t do it yourself, at least let him do it.

He tilts his head, eyes raking critically over you. There’s a cruel, amused light in his eyes, and you know you’re stupid for asking for anything because he’ll only turn it to his advantage, no matter what. “Will you give up this useless façade once you feel you have paid the penance due?”

“…yes,” you agree reluctantly.

“And do you have a preference for what method—”

“I don’t care, just—just do it.” You swallow, hard. This has to be one of the stupidest things you’ve ever done. But it’s everything you deserve, and you’re so damn tired of _thinking_ , your mind running in endless, unbearable circles. At least Dark is good at driving every coherent thought out of your head.

“Get up, then,” he commands.

You weren’t really anticipating getting out of bed while Dark was still present; you’d initially planned to do everything in your power to stay right where you were and ignore him. So you hadn’t bothered dressing. There’s a flicker of self-consciousness as you stand up before Dark in nothing but your underwear and a tank top, but… it’s not like he hasn’t seen you undressed to this level when he’s punished you before. He never seems to particularly notice or pay attention to it. Which on the one hand is reassuring and helps you feel less vulnerable about being half dressed at best while he’s still wearing his full suit, but on the other hand there’s a part of you that almost wishes he _would_ notice.

You can feel your pulse quickening already with dread.

“Come here,” Dark says, beckoning you over to a corner of the room with more open space, “and stand facing the wall.”

Your legs feel like lead as you walk over to him and do as instructed, and Dark smirks at your hesitance.

“This is not necessary,” he reminds you, voice low and sickly sweet. “You can stop at any time. Would you like a safeword?”

Does he have to say it like that? You can feel your face heating up at the implications. This—it’s not meant to be like some goddamn kink thing, you didn’t mean it like that at _all_ , you just wanted him to hurt you, and—shit. You grit your teeth and stare resolutely at the wall. “No.”

“You really should, dear.”

You’re not sure if he’s trying to look out for you, or if that’s a _threat_. He says it so devoid of emotion that you can’t tell at all.

You stay silent, and Dark comes up behind you. You gasp quietly in surprise; the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, his auras brushing against your skin like static. He grips your wrists in either hand and pins them on either side of your head, pressing you up against the wall. “Standard traffic light system, then,” he suggests.

“I don’t want your fucking sympathy! This isn’t a game, I—I deserve to be _dead;_ it should have been me, not someone innocent. The least you could do is take my punishment seriously. It’s not like you’ve ever shown any restraint in completely messing me up before.”

And maybe your tone comes out too demanding and bitter, because Dark’s grip on your wrists tightens dangerously. “You really are begging for trouble, aren’t you?” he says darkly.

Fear trickles like ice down your spine, every instinct screaming at you to back out while you can. Funny how those warning bells in your mind are so much louder now; they weren’t loud enough to snap you out of it when it was someone _else’s_ life on the line. And that, that right there, is exactly why you deserve everything you’re going to get.

You take a deep, trembling breath. But you don’t move, and you don’t say anything to either confirm or deny Dark’s claim.

“Very well, then,” is the only thing Dark says. He chuckles, low and cold, close enough that you can feel his breath against your ear. He tightens his grip, squeezing around your wrists briefly one last time before letting you go. Tendrils of darkness leech out of the wall and twine around your wrists in replacement of his touch, solidifying into shackles.

Your hands clench into fists instinctively, testing against the restriction; the shackles are as cold and unyielding as metal.

“Dark…” Your voice comes out shaky, even more nervous now that the game is starting for real. He’s moved away from you, and you’re left facing the wall, and you don’t know what he’s going to do. It’s more than a little terrifying.

Something brushes against your back, between your shoulder blades. Cool and smooth as it slides over your skin; leather, it feels like, or something very close to it. It’s the only warning you get before Dark strikes you firmly across the shoulders.

Your breath catches a little at the surprise, but—it’s not bad. It’s just. A flogger or something. And after all the pain he’s put you through in the past, a flogger is _nothing_. What the hell is that even going to do? Maybe leave a little bit of bruising at absolute worst?

You should be relieved, but at the same time it’s almost infuriating that he’s not even going to take you seriously. You refuse to give him the satisfaction of making a goddamn sound.

It quickly becomes obvious he’s just toying with you. The leather tails of the flogger ache dully where they thud heavily against your back, over and over and over and he’s not giving you any space to breathe, but the pain is spread out and easier to manage. Even when he hits hard – and _god_ , he’s capable of hitting hard when he wants – it’s not unbearable. You can grit your teeth and breathe through it.

It’s—it’s weird, but it’s oddly soothing. Almost like a deep massage; painful but satisfying. Dark has a pattern, setting up a rhythm of strikes then interrupting them with a particularly hard blow that leaves your skin stinging. It’s mostly on your back, but sometimes he hits the sides and backs of your thighs. The only thing out of all of it that makes you bite back a gasp is when he touches you himself, raking his nails down over your reddened skin and making you shudder.

Dark casts the flogger aside and places both hands on your back; his temperature always runs cool, but you feel it even more so than usual. “Warmed up enough, pet?”

You scowl and shoot him a glower over your shoulder. Why the fuck is he being _nice?_ Or, if not exactly nice, like he’s actually doing this properly. This goddamn... creepy-ass Dom thing or whatever he’s playing at. It’s the one time he’s ever taken the time to do anything like this, and it’s the one time you don’t fucking want him to.

“Why the hell are you even bothering?” you ask acidly, and maybe you are purposefully pushing him to try and make him mad, at least a little.

His smile is like ice, but he’s not rising to your bait. “So ignorant. You’ll be able to take more _punishment_ if you’ve been warmed up to it first. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

You don’t—you don’t even know what you want, honestly. You just want to _hurt_ , as if the physical pain could drown out the maelstrom of negativity and self-hatred poisoning your mind. Because it’s easier to handle the suffering that way. Easier to scratch the itch.

You just want it to stop. Want everything to stop. You’re a murderer and a monster and nothing more than Dark’s little puppet and you want _out_.

You swallow heavily. “Yes,” you reply, “that’s… what I want.”

You close your eyes against the tears you can feel prickling there, resting your forehead against the wall. This time Dark doesn’t give you any warning at all; the next strike falls against the back of your thighs and it’s definitely not the flogger anymore. The pain is _biting_ in a way that makes your stomach lurch sickeningly.

Your hands clench into fists, teeth grit to stop yourself making any sound as he does it again. And again. Maybe you did piss him off, because this is worse, so much fucking worse than just the flogger. The pain is so much deeper, more concentrated, and you can _feel_ the angry welts left behind where it falls.

It takes everything in your power not to whimper, and at first you manage, you really do, but—it keeps building. Each strike feels worse than the last, the pain not quite ebbing away between them, and Dark doesn’t give a shit about not hitting over the top of areas he’s already left bruised and aching.

Dark stops the first time you cry out. He places a hand on the back of your neck, his grip loose but possessively, vaguely threatening. He tilts your head back with the end of the—riding crop, it’s a riding crop he’s been using on you.

“You can always tell me if you want to stop,” he murmurs against your ear, _mockingly_. You wonder if at this point he actually would stop if you asked or just keep going despite your protests, and fear curls in your gut at the thought. But he’s not going to stop and you’re not going to ask, because sheer stubbornness is the only thing that’s got you through this far and that’s not going to change now.

He chuckles, low and cruel, when you only make a small choked noise and shake your head in reply.

Once you’ve started making sounds, though, you can’t stop. The next hit, powerful and biting between your shoulder blades, makes you jerk forwards, but you’re already pressed up against the wall and there’s nowhere left to go. You can’t hold back a broken little moan.

 _This_ is more like what you were expecting. Dark rains down blows, almost uncaringly, against your thighs and your ass and your back and it _hurts_. The sting is almost unbearable. And you’re gasping at every hit now, bloody, bruised welts forming where the crop lands until you’re covered in a mess of vivid red lines.

Your legs are starting to shake. You clench your hands into fists, pulling against the shackles, but it only digs them painfully into your wrists.

Dark stops for a moment, and you slump against the wall, panting. The pain has forced unwitting tears from your eyes, leaving wet trails down your face.

“D-Dark…”

He’s not actually stopping, of course not. The pause was only for him to bring another source of pain into the mix; something cracks violently beside your head and you jolt in surprise, eyes widening. It’s not—no. It’s not a whip again, not quite. It has a handle like a whip, and can apparently crack like one, but the tail is made of rolled leather coming to a tapered end.

Dark sees you staring and laughs; the sound is far from kind, and it raises the hairs on the back of your neck. “This is called a dragons tail,” he informs you.

Your stomach sinks. It makes you feel sick to think about, but it’s not like you have much time to contemplate it before Dark returns to torturing you and you get to discover how it feels first hand.

It hurts like a motherfucking _bitch_.

You shriek as the dragons tail wraps around the side of your thigh with a sickening smacking sound, your leg buckling and weight falling to the side. You can already feel it swelling, a huge bruise almost the size of your palm. Just from one hit.

It’s not always that bad – Dark uses it like a real whip as well at other times, the tapered tip impacting against your back and that _stings_ , painful and biting, but the short, sharp pain is almost easier to handle.

He alternates between them, the riding crop and the dragons tail, but you’re starting to lose track of which is which. It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all just pain now.

Your pulse feels too rapid, head spinning, and you tilt dizzyingly into the wall. The shackles are the only thing holding you up, knees too weak to keep you upright. You can’t—it’s getting overwhelming now, more than you can cope with, but you can’t give in. You refuse to give Dark that satisfaction.

Your body feels like it’s on fire, bruised and bloody where the impact has been hard enough to split skin. Every breath comes ragged and wrecked now, choking on your own sobs. Your voice is hoarse from your own cries.

Please, fucking _please_. You want to stop him, it’s too much, and you really can’t hold on much longer. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because you don’t matter, and this is what you _deserve_. So let him just fucking beat you until you pass out. It won’t be long now. There’s already darkness creeping in at the edge of your vision, so lightheaded and overheated, head swimming and—

You don’t even realise it’s over until the shackles are gone and you collapse like a rag doll. Dark’s there behind you, wrapping an arm around your waist, and that’s the only thing that keeps you vaguely upright. You want to scream at him, because you were so damn close to blissfully losing consciousness, but you don’t have the strength left to do even that much. And maybe it’s fucked up that you honestly wish he’d let just you just pass out, but unconsciousness is a far preferable option to the burning, screaming hurt that’s overriding every single thought process.

You’re a fucking _mess_ , trembling and sobbing in his arms.

“How delightfully stubborn you are,” Dark murmurs, actually sounding a little impressed. Or just amused. He certainly has no remorse for your suffering. Why would he? You asked for it.

It’s galling, letting him hold you after all that, but you don’t have the strength to push him away. You’re not quite on the verge of passing out anymore, but your head is still spinning in a way that leaves you feeling floaty and dissociated. You wouldn’t be able to stand even if you wanted to, completely limp and helpless in Dark’s embrace.

But at the same time… it’s not so bad, now that it’s over. The pain ebbs away at Dark’s touch; he slowly runs his hands over your battered skin, and the chill of it is soothing. More than just soothing. You don’t know if he’s doing something else to you too, because the ache bleeds out far too readily to be just that, but you’re too lightheaded to think about it too much.

His touch feels good.

Your shaking breaths start to even out – not back to normal, it’ll take much longer for that, but enough that you’re not dangerously close to hyperventilating anymore.

Dark runs a hand over the bruise on your thigh, purple and mottled where he hit you with the dragons tail. His other hand traces over the mark on your chest, and his lips graze against the back of your neck.

You stir a little more at that, goosebumps rising on your arms. “D-Dark…?” You’re not sure if it’s a question or a protest. Because he _is_ doing something.

His auras aren’t just brushing against your skin in passing like they normally do, it’s—you don’t know what it is. Where his fingers are pressed against your sigil, his auras are… bleeding into it, sinking _into_ the wound. Your eyes widen, heat rising to your face. You don’t know what it is, but the sensation is—is—

You swallow a moan. You’ve never felt anything like it before, but it’s _good_. It’s like he can interact directly with the darkness leeched inside of you; like he’s prised open your soul and can do whatever he wants to it, make you _feel_ whatever he wants.

You grip Dark’s wrist, fingers clutching at him. Your mind still feels completely hazed – you haven’t recovered enough from the pain at all, and now there’s _this_ , pain mixing with pleasure and it’s making your brain short-circuit.

“What are you…?” you try to ask. You can’t even focus enough to finish the question.

It feels somehow… _intimate_ , having Dark’s auras twining into your own darkness, and that should be horrifying but you don’t have the strength left to be repulsed. Or even remember you should be.

“I can give you anything,” Dark murmurs, in that low, seductive voice he uses when he’s trying to charm you into something. Almost hypnotic.

“ _Dark_ ,” you protest. He’s not fucking helping. Your pulse is pounding in your ears, face flushing and eyes glazed over. And you try to focus on the pain, the dull, burning ache of countless bruises and welts left all over you, but somehow that only makes it _better_ when it mingles with the heat flooding through your veins.

It’s not even a physical pleasure; it’s something far more nebulous and surreal than that. Fuck. Dark is using whatever control he has to get inside your head and make you _squirm_ , and you hate that he can do it so easily.

His teeth graze against your ear, and the contact sends shivers through you. “All of this suffering could end. You don’t have to keep fighting.”

You let out a quiet whimper at his words. He makes it sound so good. Makes it feel so good.

“You wanted it all to stop, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” you admit, voice cracking on a moan.

“All you need to do is let me in.”

You want to scream at him to stop this, to just _let you go_. Because this is so wrong, so messed up. But at the same time… you’re fucking _tired_. You’ve already used up all your strength, and you can’t even blame Dark for that one because you were the one who asked him to punish you, and then kept pushing yourself past your limits even though you could have – _should_ have – told him to stop.

Your mind is racing, thoughts blurred amongst the haze of pain and pleasure and the sensation of Dark’s cold, possessive touch.

“Let me in,” Dark repeats, enunciating each word smoothly. He says it like an offer, a promise. And you’re too broken down and messed up to fight it anymore.

There are tears trickling down your cheeks again and you don’t know why. You’re just so tired.

“Yes,” you agree, barely more than a whisper.

“Say it for me.”

“ _Yes!_ I’ll let you in.”

“Tell me you trust me.”

“I trust you.”

“Promise you’ll do anything for me.”

“I will, Dark, please, just—I can’t take _living_ like this anymore, just make it _stop!_ ” You’re begging by the end.

He’s doing it on purpose, you can tell by the malicious light behind his smile. You don’t need to say any of it, he’s just making you because he’s enjoying watching you break for him. You’re trembling in his arms and you can’t think; don’t _want_ to think.

Dark tilts your head back and kisses you, and you shatter.

You part your lips, moaning softly into the kiss as he deepens it, claiming your mouth. Without realising what you’re doing, you find your hands sliding up his chest and clinging to his shoulders. He murmurs approvingly at that, then picks you up by the back of your thighs.

A hiss of pain escapes from you and your grip tightens, fingers clutching at his suit jacket; the pressure on your already bruised skin is nearly unbearable. But it doesn’t last long. Dark only carries you as far as the bed.

He’s actually halfway gentle as he lays you down, mindful of the injuries he’s inflicted on you. But there’s nothing gentle about the way he pins you down with his own body weight.

You shiver beneath him, a thrill of lust running through you. Half-dressed and held down beneath him, his lips on yours again and—you want this. Why do you want it? You can’t even remember why you spent so long resisting him. That should scare you, but your mind is nothing but white noise and that ringing in your ears that always accompanies Dark, so loud it drowns out all the sense you have, but you’re so used to it now that it’s almost comforting.

The way Dark kisses you leaves you breathless; it’s deep and thorough and heated, and you find yourself helplessly kissing him back, arching against him. Your body is moving on autopilot, hands sliding beneath his suit jacket and working it off him, fumbling to loosen his tie and undo the buttons of his shirt. He allows you, to a point. But then he smirks and pulls you away, pinning your wrists above your head with one hand.

“Dark,” you whine.

He laughs at you, smug and downright fucking cruel. You don’t care. His voice makes your hair stand on end.

“Look at you now,” he says mockingly. His free hand brushes against your cheek, and you turn your face into the touch. Your eyes are completely blank as you stare at up him, face flushed and lips still parted. He could do anything to you like this, and you can’t even remember how to say no.

“You really are so much prettier when you’re broken,” he murmurs.

Dark rests his forehead against yours. For a moment it seems like almost a tender gesture, but—it’s not that. You can feel him, his presence probing at your mind. And it’s familiar, because it’s not like this is the first time that he’s tried to get in your head and take control of you, but at the same time it’s not _stopping_.

You have no defences left at all. He’s already won your surrender, and you can’t fight him. All you can do is shriek as he forces his way into your mind.

It’s no longer the crude puppet strings he latched onto you before, this is _control_ , complete and total. There’s no boundaries, no distinction between your existence and Dark’s presence, and it’s utterly overwhelming. You’re drowning in him, suffocating, like you could physically choke on his auras.

You writhe beneath Dark, trying to shove him off, because this—this is _terrifying_ , this isn’t what you wanted at all. But there’s nowhere for you to go; his body is pressed against the whole length of yours, easily pinning down against the bed. That had excited you at first, but now it just feels like you’re _trapped_. Fear makes your pulse pound in your ears.

Your mind is like an open book for him. Every memory, every thought, all of your deepest, darkest secrets. Anything he wants, he can take from you. He’s in your head, permeating the very essence of your being, and it feels like the complete and utter violation of your soul.

So this is what it means to let him in.

There are tears streaming down your cheeks, and you’re begging him mindlessly in slurred, broken sobs. “Stop, please, _stop_ , just get _out!”_

Dark could cut off your pleas in an instant, if he wanted. But he’s enjoying this – you can _feel_ it, the pure, sadistic satisfaction. He’s drawing it out, allowing you to experience every single fucking moment.

“My little puppet,” he says, and it feels as though the words are pouring corruption straight into your soul. “You’re going to do anything and everything I tell you.”

You can feel him clawing through your memories, and you’ve never felt more exposed and vulnerable in your life. Especially since he’s just radiating careless disdain for all of it – friends, family, all the little life experiences that made you who you are.

“Puppets don’t need such human trivialities as this.”

You understand what he means just a fraction of a second before it happens, but it’s too late to stop it. If you even could. All you can do is _scream_.

Dark tears your mind apart, ripping out everything he deems unnecessary. 

The pain of it is beyond unbearable.

It seems to last eternity. Consuming you completely until the only thing that exists is _agony_. Agony and suffering and you break in his hands, over and over and over again. When he’s done, his consciousness entwined with yours is the only thing holding the shattered remains together.

All that’s left of you is fragments.

Your voice is wrecked from screaming, but you can’t make a sound anymore anyway. Your body lies completely limp and unresponsive beneath him, eyes blank.

There’s nothing—

        —you’re nothing.

No thoughts, no light, just—Dark.

 _Dark_.

He smirks and presses a soft kiss to your cold lips.


	9. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took a little while to get around to finishing off the epilogue even though it's so short; I'm moving internationally to California next week (I'm in the UK now for reference, so yay visas and bullshit) and everything has been a mess of trying to make sure that's all organised. (Spoiler: it's not. @_@) But at least fic is done!
> 
>  **Warnings:** Brief gore; mind break/mind control/brainwashing, however you'd like to phrase it; implied abuse, including a very brief, very subtle implication of potential sexual abuse, but it's vague enough it doesn't have to be that. (It wasn't _meant_ to be that, I was just writing words and wrote one and then was like, 'ohh, wait, that sounds a little suspect. Ah well, it ups the creep factor, I'll leave it'. So take it however you will.)

There was always something special, something beautiful in the stillness of that first moment of silence. The moment when screams and choked sobs cut off into a final, sickening death gurgle, then stopped completely. You could sense Dark's quiet, smug satisfaction as intimately as if the emotion were your own.

He was pleased.

You would do anything to please him.

This soul had been one of the more troublesome ones, but Dark was right. Those were always the most fun to break.

They had actually thought they could escape, tried _so hard_ to get away. Adorable. As if anyone could escape Dark once he'd decided to sink his claws into them.

~~You never did, and the fact that some other insignificant little toy got almost close, even for a moment, leaves a bitter, resentful taste in your mouth.~~

You had pinned them down viciously, a dagger through each palm, and then Dark had ripped the heart from their chest. Held it in front of them, so their last sight was of the poison-black essence of the void violating and tearing apart the still-beating organ.

The screams had been delicious. Finally, a better use for their mouth. Because they had been a mouthy one. Cursing Dark, cursing you. Calling you a monster, a whore, a traitor. The look of horror and disgust in their eyes as they'd realised what you were had been haunting.

"You-- you're not _human_."

Their own foolish mistake for ever thinking you were, honestly. Their mistake for running from Dark, for trying to seek assistance from anyone or anything else in this place. Nothing here would ever save them.

For just one fleeting moment, though, their words had struck a chord. Were you _meant_ to be human? Had you ever been? All you knew now was that you were Dark's. You belonged to him, his puppet, and that was the only thing that was important.

Everything you were was by his design. Ashen, lifeless skin, veins tainted black with ichor and corruption. The bloodied, never-healing sigil carved into you, binding you to him. Your collar, your blank, empty eyes, the bruises around your throat and on your hips.

Dark owned you; heart, mind, body, and soul.

The after-image of the mangled corpse faded out of existence, devoured by the darkness. It had only been their consciousness you'd had to toy with; not a physical death, this time. But that was alright. That meant they were still out there, and Dark could make their life a living hell in retribution for their defiance.

~~Don't you know all about _that._~~

You retrieve your daggers, summoning them back to you without a second thought. It's as natural as breathing to you now.

Dark moves closer, trailing his hand down your spine and settling it at the small of your back. The affection makes you shiver, chest tightening. He's pleased with you, and there is nothing you crave more in your existence than his approval.

"You did well today," Dark says. And his voice, god, his voice makes you feel weak at the knees. Especially when he's praising you like that.

His other hand tilts your jaw, and you obediently turn your face to him. He's smirking, all power and control.

Dark kisses you, and you melt against him. He can be almost tender like this; a far cry from when his temper snaps and you're the nearest thing he has to take his anger out on. Not that you mind either way. He's the only thing keeping you grounded, making your existence real; any attention is worth the suffering. Because what's a puppet without a master to control it?

He's all you have. He's everything to you.

You part your lips for him, letting him deepen the kiss, letting him taste you. Tears well up in your eyes; you don't know why. You never know why. Dark cups your face and wipes them away with his thumb.

"I love you," you murmur. You say it so often. You're not sure which of you you're trying to convince.

Dark smiles, and there's nothing but cold, callous disdain in his expression. "I know you do, pet."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it is!! Finished!! That is... a pretty massive achievement for me, given I normally say multichapters are my archnemesis, lol. I'm generally much more of a oneshot writer, but I just had so much fun with this scenario I didn't want to stop. x)
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who's come along for the ride and followed this fic!! Everyone who's read it, either here or on Tumblr, everyone who's left kudos, and especially those who commented. I am an awkward nerd and too shy to even reply to comments on my own fic, but I guarantee I read them _multiple_ times and appreciate every single one.  <3
> 
> I hope you've enjoyed this horrifying, messed up story as much as I have, and thank you again for being here and giving it a chance!!


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